Coal’s demise teaches us to be cautious about progress

Why the extinguishing of coal power should dampen attitudes to what promises to be progress.

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

A sky line shows steam rising from a power station's chimney and cooling towers.

Ratcliffe on Soar power station.

Malcolm Neal, CC BY-SA 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons.

Chimneys. In our 1920s house, we have two of them, rising into the sky like solid brick antennae. Look across most big cities in the UK today and virtually every house still has them. Yet most of them remain idle, monuments of a bygone age. Useful for holding the TV aerial but not much else.

I thought of chimneys recently when driving up the M1 past Ratcliffe-on-Soar Power Station. On the last day of September this year, it was disconnected from the national grid, as the UK’s last coal-fired power station. The age of coal was over.

Back in the day, chimneys were busy. In the Industrial Revolution of the 1700s and 1800, coal was used to light towns, power railways, and fuel steam engines. By 1850 we were mining 62 million tonnes of coal every year. Coal was the fuel of the present, driving the technology of the future. Chimneys were a sign of a bright way ahead, churning out smoke from coal-fired factories and bringing safe fires into the hearth and home on those dark wintry northern European nights. Coal was leading us into the sunny uplands of prosperity, comfort and mastery over nature. The power behind the industrial revolution, it was as crucial to the present - and the future - as the smartphone seems to us today.

It began to dawn on us we had a problem with coal during the Great Smog of London in 1952. A period of cold weather, an unusually high number of domestic coal fires, no wind and an anticyclone which acted like a thick, stifling blanket, all of it kept the soot-filled fumes from escaping into the atmosphere. As a result, a miasma of dense, smelly fog sat for days over London, killing thousands of people. It led to the Clean Air Acts of 1956 and 1968, banning emissions of black smoke and making residents of urban areas and operators of factories convert to smokeless fuel. Margaret Thatcher’s fight with the miners in 1982, leading to the closure of many pits, was another nail in the coffin of coal.

In October 2001, the Large Combustion Plant Directive aimed to reduce carbon emissions throughout Europe. The UK planned to end coal use by 2025, and we managed to get there a year early. On the domestic level, not many of us use coal or wood fires anymore. Since May 2023, it has been illegal to sell ordinary domestic coal in the UK. Wet wood is banned too. You can burn what’s called ‘dry wood’, with 20% moisture or less, but you can’t go into the woods and bring home random logs you find on a weekend walk any more. Wood burners remain popular, yet even they are suspect, as they produce high levels of CO2.

Gradually we realised that there was an order and a rhythm to the natural world that we messed with at our peril. There was, as Marilynne Robinson once called a ‘Givenness’ to the world. We simply had to learn to respect that givenness, that order, and live within the limits it placed upon us. And as a result, the chimneys lie idle.

The demise of coal - and chimneys - teaches us a lesson. Not everything that promises progress is good. Wisdom lies not in pushing forward with whatever technology or new idea offers more choice, more possibility, but knowing what will diminish us and what will give us life.

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War & peace

6 July 2023

4 min read

When to stand up in an increasingly insecure world

When war is ‘othering’ by other means, the brutal realities of our world can be overwhelming. Ziya Meral contemplates what it means to take a stand.

Ziya Meral

Dr Ziya Meral is a researcher, advisor and programmes director specialising on global trends shaping defence and security, politics and foreign policies. He is a Senior Associate Fellow of the Royal United Services Institute.

Recently, I found myself sitting quietly at a cathedral buzzing with tourists, reflecting on demanding global developments and uttering a few words of prayers, not for world peace, but for guidance on how I should live my own life amidst all these.

Today’s world is a brutal reminder of timeless truths about the human condition, about continuum of violence and aggression in human affairs, about exclusion and marginalisation of the ‘other’ amidst economic downturns, about how fragile peace and prosperity are, and how the future might not always be better than the past.

There is a bitter realisation that there is no clear end ahead of us in the near future to this war of choice by Russia.

As I write these lines, Russian forces continue their brutal invasion of Ukraine, killing tens of thousands, forcing millions out of their homes, destroying town after town, and intentionally pursuing a scourge earth policy to destroy the habitability of towns and cities and sustainability of life. Ukrainians continue to bravely advance their counter offensive to push Russian forces as much as possible, while NATO leaders gear up for a summit in Lithuania in July, which will assess and discuss future support to Ukraine. There is a bitter realisation that there is no clear end ahead of us in the near future to this war of choice by Russia. Some sort of ‘frozen’ peace might be achieved by stopping or reducing violence, but no matter what Ukraine needs our prolonged support to ensure it does not face yet another wave of invasion a few years down the line. This is why even President Macron, who has been cynical about NATO, is now talking about Ukraine’s membership to the alliance as lesser of all of the risks ahead of us.

We have entered a new era, that is not simply just about Ukraine. For the last decade we have seen a major shift in global affairs as not only world’s two major powers, US and China, increasingly saw each other as a competitor and threat against national interests, a long list of medium-sized powers actively used force in invading other countries, or pursuing proxy wars and meddling into politics of other countries. From cyberwarfare to a new era of espionage to attempts at influencing other nations and altering trajectories of their politics, investments into a new generation of nuclear weapons and increasing of nuclear stocks to major investments into defence, most states in the world are gearing towards a decade of instability ahead of us.

Thus, it is not surprising that Sweden and Finland gave up historic policies of neutrality and decided to join NATO, or that Japan is pursuing a historic investment into its defence in a break away from its historic stand, or that China is going to double (or more) its nuclear stocks by 2030, or that even France is about to undertake a historic level of investment in its defence. The list goes on. All of these happen within a context of genuine existential risks to our existence. Like climate change, there are the domino effects of conflicts into our lives from faraway places. From energy prices, to food shortages, to disruption of trade and electronic parts, to new technologies like AI raising all sorts of ethical and practical questions and risks. There are hundreds of millions of human beings living in geographies and countries that are not able to care, provide and protect and give them a sustainable and meaningful life. Irregular migration, named ‘illegal’ in today’s tabloid language, is only increasing across the world, with only a small percentage ever making it to UK or Europe. Human beings do not simply leave their lives behind and take clear risks if they do not feel they have to.

We are far from being the first-generation processing news of wars and conflicts.

All of these are overwhelming realities, ones that we cannot simply ignore. It is normal for us to feel guilty as our daily lives continue in relative peace and property compared to millions of others out there, and it is normal for us to feel helpless and at times despair about all these developments that are clearly out of anyone’s control.

But as I sat there in the cathedral, I could not help but think that this is not the first time the world has gone through such a convergence of insecurities, and unlikely to be the last time, and that we are far from being the first-generation processing news of wars and conflicts and seeing nations take aggressive postures against one another. I thought about so many heroic figures across history that stood up for truth, for peace, for reconciliation, for justice in such moments and so many heroes that gave their lives to defend us against those seeking to harm us. Their legacies remind us that we all have a decision to make, a stand to take and a role to play in such historic moments. On my part, I am all aware of my limitations, and at times feeble attempts to be part of conversations that point towards solutions. I am also all aware of the deep darkness out there, but also as a Christian, a gentle hope that lies within it. The light shines into the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. The promise I find in the figure of Christ on the Cross is not an escape to another world, but embracing of the only one we have here and now, in prayer that all of our efforts could together amount to something much bigger than we realise. As TS Eliot put it, for us there is only trying, the rest is not our business!