Across the UK, fossil fuel companies' broken promises have left scarred and polluted landscapes, and no one held accountableWhen you're in a hole, keep digging. This is the strategy of opencast miners across the world: our past debts and future liabilities can one day be discharged if only we're allowed to dig a little deeper and extract a little more. And public authorities keep falling for it.The UK's biggest opencast coalmine, Ffos-y-Fran in south Wales, was granted permission in 2005 on the grounds that it would rehabilitate a hill, on the outskirts of Merthyr Tydfil, which had been made dangerous by the shafts and spoil heaps left by deep mining. It wasn't called a coalmine, but a "land reclamation scheme". If the reclaimers happened to stumble across 11m tonnes of coal while improving the land by digging a 400-hectare (1,000-acre) pit, 200 metres deep, who could blame them for taking it? Continue reading...
As the toxic legacy of opencast mining in Wales shows, operators get the profits, and the public get the costs | George Monbiot
1. června 2023 13:30
Příroda
Celý článek: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jun/01/fossil-fuel-toxic-legacy-coal-wales-mining
Zdroj: The Guardian