{"id":67646,"date":"2024-04-27T13:28:08","date_gmt":"2024-04-27T18:28:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=67646"},"modified":"2024-04-27T13:28:08","modified_gmt":"2024-04-27T18:28:08","slug":"what-did-they-expect","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=67646","title":{"rendered":"What did they expect?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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What did they expect?<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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My house backs on to a railway line which is now exclusively for passenger trains.\u00a0 It wasn\u2019t always this way though.\u00a0 There was a time when the relative peace was broken six times a day by the roar of freight trains heading up the Rhymney Valley.\u00a0 Their destination was the coal washery at Cwmbargoed, from where they would ferry thousands of tonnes of coal per journey to the power station in Aberthaw and the steel works in Port Talbot.\u00a0 Aberthaw power station closed at the end of March 2020.\u00a0 And, on 23 February this year, the last coal train made its way down the valley, taking a last load of coal to Port Talbot.\u00a0 Of the three, that left Port Talbot steelworks the only one still operating\u2026 although, and not for unconnected reasons, Port Talbot\u2019s days were also numbered.<\/p>\n

Whether Britain should still have been mining Welsh coal rather depends upon how favourable you are to exporting your carbon emissions to someone else\u2019s country.\u00a0 After all \u2013 and despite expensive experimental attempts at hydrogen steel production \u2013 if you want to make virgin steel \u2013 for example if you had a plan to build and operate thousands of wind turbines \u2013 you have to use coal.\u00a0 That being the case, the least environmentally harmful approach would be to source it from a huge deposit 25 miles away rather than shipping it thousands of miles from Brazil, China, or Kazakhstan.<\/p>\n

This, no doubt, was why the otherwise green-leaning Blair government gave the approval for a vast opencast mine just outside Merthyr Tydfil.\u00a0 As George Monbiot\u00a0complained<\/a>\u00a0at the time:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe diggers at Ffos-y-fran, on the outskirts of Merthyr Tydfil, are set to excavate 1,000 acres of land to a depth of 600ft.\u00a0 There has never been a hole quite like it in Britain, and our government\u2019s climate change policies are about to fall into it.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What did they expect? My house backs on to a railway line which is now exclusively for passenger trains.\u00a0 It wasn\u2019t always this way though.\u00a0 There was a time when the relative peace was broken six times a day by the roar of freight trains heading up the Rhymney Valley.\u00a0 Their destination was the coal […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[141,147,31147,31360],"class_list":["post-67646","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-energy-2","category-environment","tag-climate-change","tag-coal","tag-consciousness-of-sheep","tag-tim-watkins"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67646","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=67646"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67646\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":67647,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67646\/revisions\/67647"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=67646"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=67646"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=67646"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}