No new coal mine in West Cumbria: join XR’s Northern Rebellion!

Allan Todd writes: Things are certainly ‘hotting up’ in Cumbria – and that’s not just down to the current heatwave! In the lead-up to XR’s ‘September Rebellion’, local XR groups have been encouraged to undertake their own ‘warming-up’ actions throughout August.

For us up here in Cumbria, that has coincided with a third attempt by Cumbria County Council to give the go-ahead for the opening up of a new deep coal mine, up to 550m under the Irish Sea, on the coast of west Cumbria. If West Cumbria Mining (WCM)’s plan goes ahead, it will be the UK’s first deep coal mine in over 30 years.

Originally, Cumbria CC intended to make its decision on Thursday 20 August, in their Kendal offices. Consequently, XR South Lakes, XR Carlisle, XR West Cumbria and XR Penrith – along with activists from South Lakes Action on Climate Change (SLACC) and Keep Cumbrian Coal In the Hole

– had planned to hold a protest outside the CCC offices.

A poster for the ‘Keep Cumbrian Coal In The Hole’ campaign

However, on 12th August, Cumbria CC announced that, apparently because the Development Control & Regulation Committee’s Report wasn’t “ready”, the meeting had been cancelled – for the third time! Initially, the groups opposed to the mine thus announced that their protest was also cancelled.

HOWEVER, CLIMATE ACTIVISTS PLEASE NOTE… this cancellation has been cancelled!

A protest WILL still take place:

From 8.30am, at New Road Common, KENDAL

So bring your banners, XR pennants, flags, musical instruments, etc. – and face masks! – for a physically-distanced and safe protest!

As Maggie Mason, of SLACC & XR South Lakes – and one of the campaigners involved in the recent legal challenge – said on hearing the news that the council meeting had just been cancelled:

“We’re not reading too much into this [cancellation] but are hoping that the delay is due to the highly credible evidence submitted by objectors being carefully considered by the County Council.”

Dr. Henry Adams, also of SLACC and XR South Lakes, said:

“If Cumbria County Council attempt to simply re-jig the s106 agreement, then there will be another campaign for a second judicial review!”

Ultimately, the people of Cumbria are being sold a ‘pig in a poke’. This development would lock West Cumbria into a dying industry instead of investing in the thousands of long term, decent, low carbon jobs that we need. This is an opportunity to move away from ‘business as usual’, build a secure future for our children and really ‘build back better’ after Covid-19, as communities and future generations deserve.

And, as these photos – taken earlier this week – show, Climate Crisis campaigners in Cumbria, in anticipation of the council meeting and the protest, have already been busy dropping banners from bridges and other places around the county:

Banner-drop, outside Cumbria County Council’s offices in Carlisle

Banner-drop, outside the HSBC branch in Penrith. HSBC has one of the worst records on funding the dirty fossil fuel industry – second only to Barclays!

Banner-drops in Kendal

So…keep the pressure up, & join the protest in Kendal on Thursday 20 August.

It’ll be excellent practice for XR’s Northern Rebellion, in the Manchester area (precise location to be decided!!) from 1-3 September!!

Background Information

1. Despite claiming their mine would bring great benefits to west Cumbria and the UK in general, it’s important to know that WCM is owned by Cayman Islands-registered EMR Capital. Thus they would not be paying UK tax on their project – but they would be significantly worsening the impact of extreme weather, resulting from global heating, on an area that has already experienced 3 ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ devastating flooding events in less than 20 years (most recently in 2015).

2. In addition, Cumbria is also on the front line of the Climate Emergency because of anticipated rising sea levels – with several west coast towns projected to be underwater from annual flooding by 2050, if current rates of CO2 emissions continue.

3. And this, in the context of a worsening Climate Crisis – and evidence that the UK government is not meeting its own targets for emissions reductions! As the earlier Heathrow judgement showed, the government is obliged to treat the 2015 Paris Agreement’s temperature goal of keeping the average global temperature increase to below 1.5C as legally-binding.

4. This is crucial, as most climate models now predict that current emissions put the planet on course to hit 1.5C by 2030. The UNEP2019 Report calculates that the UK needs to achieve emission reductions of 10% – yet the WCM would add approx. another 10 million tonnes of CO2 to UK emissions!

5. The case against the coal mine is a strong one – made even stronger by the recent letter from the steel industry’s much-respected Materials Processing Institute, which makes it clear that, as well as the need to de-carb steel-making, the assertions of WCM that there’s a need for the coking coal they hope to extract over the next 50 (yes- 50!) years are, quite simply, wrong.

6. In addition, WCM’s argument that their coal is needed in the UK as a substitution for imported coal has been de-bunked by, amongst others, Prof. Paul Elkins – who has stated that the mine would significantly add to global CO2 emissions:

And, as Henry Goodwin – of Sustainable Carlisle and XR Carlisle – has said:

“Professor Elkins states clearly that the increased supply [of coal, resulting from WCM’s production] would … delay the necessary shift to lower carbon steel making and result in additional coal being burnt over the lifetime of the mine.”

7. Plus, instead of being used in the UK – as originally stated by WCM – it now appears that 87% of the coal would be exported!

8. Also shown to be false have been WCM’s claims that their mine would provide 500 jobs for 50 years: given that steel making is rapidly switching away from coal to more environmentally-friendly alternatives. In the UK, there are already shifts to using electric arc furnaces using scrap steel (of which there will continue to be plenty); and here, as well as other European countries (such as Germany and Sweden), there are moves to use hydrogen instead of coal. As a result, demand for coal is set to reduce significantly before 2030 – leaving west Cumbria with a ‘stranded asset’, a dying industry and no jobs, instead of the green jobs which are desperately needed to avoid Climate Breakdown.

9. Previously, a CrowdJustice campaign financed a successful judicial review to halt the project, forcing WCM to amend their original plan, after CCC had initially approved it, even though the plan had not submitted any CO2 emissions.

10. In addition, Marianne Birkby of Radiation Free Lakeland (RaFL)

– who is also involved in the Keep Cumbrian Coal In The Hole campaign – has shown the dangers posed by such a mine to the radioactive waste stored at near-by Sellafield. In fact, a recent article in The Ecologist has exposed the links between West Cumbria Mining and the Committee for Radioactive Waste Management – the government appointed the CEO of WCM to the Committee on RWM, in the same month it had green-lighted WCM’s project!

11. There is a petition to sign – still current – for those who are opposed to this new fossil fuel project. Sign here.