Building back greener

The Environment Secretary has announced plans to use ambitious, legally-binding environmental targets to ensure that Britain can build back greener from coronavirus, better able to combat the environmental and climate challenges we face.

  • Outside the EU, the UK has the opportunity to set its own course and take ambitious action to protect the environment for future generations.
     
  • As part of the landmark Environment Bill currently making its way through Parliament, the government will introduce at least one long-term target in four priority areas to deliver significant and lasting environmental improvements, including in cleaner air, cleaner water, less waste and more biodiversity.
     
  • These ambitious targets will help the UK to build back better and greener after coronavirus, guaranteeing lasting progress on some of the biggest environmental challenges facing us today.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Are Carbon free coal mines on the agenda?
8:24 pm
Chris Whiteside said…
Until we can build things like wind turbines without it, we'll need steel as a component of even the greenest of development plans.

Until we have an economic process to make steel without coking coal, which at the moment we do not, some metallurgical coal will ne required, not to burn as fuel but to make steel.

The original planning permission for Wests Cumbria Mining specified that the mine is for metallurgical coal, and without going into massive detail the proposed amendments for the application are about this issue and do not back away from that principle.

Whatever supposed "experts" the opponents of West Cumbria Mining may quote to the contrary, we will do less damage to the environment if we mine coking coal for the British steel industry in a responsible manner in Cumbria and take it direct to our steel plants by railway than if we strip mine it in the Appalachians and ship it over the Atlantic.
1:58 pm
Chris Whiteside said…
The idea of a "carbon free" coal mine is a nonsense, but the idea of responsibly using coal in ways which do the minimum possible damage to the environment is not.

Nor is it wrong to argue that where you have to use coal or any other resource, sourcing it in this country rather than thousands of miles away will, other things being equal, have a lower carbon footprint.
2:02 pm
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