Up in the rafters - why is coal so bad?

A team of protesters has climbed inside the coal washery at the Ffos-y-Fran site, and are busy getting ready to hang a banner off the side. While they’re messing around with ropes, it’s worth talking about coal, and why just washing it isn’t going to cut out the worst pollution it causes.

Obviously, coal can be pretty dirty stuff. We know from experience that if you’re hanging out in an opencast coal mine it pays to have some old clothes on, or better still, some disposable overalls. (Ours would probably be made out of organic hemp.)

But that’s not the serious dirt on coal. The BIG reason to stop using fossil fuels is the greenhouse gas emissions they cause - releasing gases into the atmosphere which make the planet better at capturing the sun’s heat. The upshot is that Earth gets hotter – climate change, which you may have heard a bit about recently.

We burn fossil fuels because they’re such an amazingly concentrated form of energy. This makes them very convenient, but that convenience comes with a pretty steep price – the impacts of climate change. Coal is the most damaging fossil fuel because it’s very carbon-intense - per kilowatt-hour of energy generated, it releases the most greenhouse gases. That’s why coal is responsible for over half of the CO2 we’ve added to the atmosphere since the industrial revolution!

So there you go. Coal’s a pollution nightmare, whether you wash it or not. Time we tried something else?

the coal hole