THE closure of Kellingley Colliery yesterday was a devastating event — not least for all the remaining 450 miners that lost their employment but also because it marks the end of centuries of coalmining in Britain. Coalmining kept homes warm and fuelled the industrial revolution, allowed the production of steel to build our railways and ships to export and import goods around the world. Coal put the Great into “Great Britain” and generated much of the electricity ensuring a secure affordable supply for both domestic and industrial markets.

The closure of Kellingley Colliery is premature. It has been in production for only 50 out of a planned 100 years, leaving millions of tons of reserves below ground. That coal could have been mined and could have continued to be burnt at the nearby Drax power station for at least another decade, even under the short-sighted energy policy put in place by the current Conservative government — which masqueraded as being good for the environment to appease the green lobby.

The closure of Kellingley will do nothing to reduce the CO2 emissions from Drax: in fact the reverse is true. It will be worse for the environment as the millions of tons of coal that will continue to be burnt at Drax will be imported from Russia, Colombia and the United States. The carbon footprint of burning a ton of coal transported from Russia has to be higher that transporting it seven miles by rail from the pithead at Kellingley. We still continue to rely on coal to produce around 20 to 30 per cent of our electricity, even after subsidising renewable energy with billions of pounds of public money — much of it from tax levied on fossil fuels.