On The Celebration Of The Closure Of Ratcliffe-on-Soar

All over social media, both unwashed and somewhat more presentably scrubbed up Green hippies are loudly celebrating the demise of Britain’s last coal-fired power station at Ratcliffe-on-Soar, Nottinghamshire. I won’t reproduce those posts here because quite frankly they make me feel sick.

What is it with coal specifically? Yes, it does produce more carbon dioxide (a natural gas) when burnt and it does, if not burned carefully with appropriate pollutant capturing filters, produce some pretty noxious combustion by-products. But in modern power stations, it’s not like your open fire contributing to London smogs of the 1950s; coal is pulverized and burned very efficiently, producing minimal pollution. But it does release CO2, which is not captured. The horror!! It’s not GREEN!

So rabid Greens all over former Great Britain - now deindustrialised, emasculated, windmill and woke leftard-infested ‘clean’ Little Britain - are cheering in their high-pitched squeaky voices on social media about the loss of our last coal-fired generation capacity and the complete disappearance of coal from our economy - because we’re not ‘allowed’ to dig it up anymore or make steel with it even.

To me, this ideological, fanatical hatred of coal is a proxy for the ideological, fanatical hatred of Britain’s pioneering legacy re. the Industrial Revolution, which was built on King Coal initially. Greens hate us for being the first to industrialise and for initiating industrialisation worldwide, literally dragging billions out of extreme poverty and emancipating the masses on the way. They really do.

Coal envy and hatred is also symptomatic of the anti-science, factually challenged, post normal, post Enlightenment moronic mindset so characteristic of modern Greens and climate activists like XR and JSO. Coal in fact is a miraculous substance; literally, it is prehistoric solar energy condensed into a shiny black rock, which is there for the taking beneath our feet. Early coal mining involved much hardship and suffering but, as the fruits of industrialisation grew, we became much better at extracting it and coal miners suffered considerably less as a result and proud communities of coal workers were a thing in Great Britain, especially in the north. Alas, Maggie’s Tories put an end to that and British coal production went into sharp decline after the 1980s. A faint glimmer of hope appeared for working class communities in Cumbria when the Whitehaven colliery was approved for the extraction of coking coal, but ironically, Labour, the former heroic party of the blue collar working classes, put a swift end to that by refusing to defend the mine against a scurrilous lawfare suit launched by Fiends of the Earth and a bunch of middle class Green twats from the affluent south Lakes area, far removed from working class and deprived North West Cumbria.

It’s all gone now. Coal has been erased from these Isles and lies unused and unloved beneath our feet whilst our demented politicians and holier-than-thou institutionalised (they should be) ‘experts’ roll out the Net Zero agenda which involves sequestering hundreds of thousands of acres of our seas, our beautiful countryside and rich farmland to basically do the same thing which Mother Nature did for us 100 millions years ago by making coal, gas and oil from plants. Modern ‘renewables’ do much the same thing by capturing energy from the sun (as direct solar radiation or the movement of air). Except Mother Nature found time to also package it in convenient, highly concentrated, easily usable and convenient forms like carboniferous rock, shale gas and oil. The best our ‘experts’ can do is carpet our land and seascapes with thousands of industrial turbines, solar panels, mega pylons and battery ‘farms’, which is not a sane alternative to what Mother Nature gave us. Call it as ‘clean’ and ‘renewable’ as you like, it’s not.

Give me ‘dirty’ old coal any day over seas of sodding great windmills and killing fields of solar panels. Perhaps one day, Albion will return and will make Coal great again. Maybe . . . . there’s plenty left.