Let’s celebrate the UK being powered for three days in a row without the use of coal, something that hasn’t happened since 1888.
It seems like only yesterday that doom merchants and climate change deniers were telling us that renewables didn’t work and that we would always need coal.
Yet between April 21 and 24 in the UK, wind and solar power provided 31.1 per cent of all our electricity. And that doesn’t include biomass and hydroelectric power.
I predict that by the end of this year the UK will have gone for seven days in a row without coal. In two years’ time it will be a month.
The energy transition to a low carbon future is well and truly with us and it is here to stay. And not before time.
Among the least convincing arguments put forward by those who love coal is the one that insists we must use the coal because we still have so much of it.
There is plenty of flint across the UK but no one feels compelled to make axes with it. The Stone Age didn’t end because they ran out of stones.
Now let’s apply ourselves to scrapping all single-use plastics.
Blake Court,
Wheldrake, York
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