Nature's Evil

In 1946 the new Labour government nationalised the British coal industry. The new state monopoly was vast – it included almost a thousand mines, employing 800,000 men. The planned economy increased output, but the demand for coal was falling because of competition from oil. Run by electricity, new mining machines increased the productivity of each worker, and at the beginning of the 1970s the number of miners fell threefold. Between 1984 and 1985 many pits downed tools in protest against colliery closures, leading to the longest miners’ strike in Britain’s history. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher called the miners ‘the enemy within’; her allies were oil and gas, which had been discovered off the North Sea coast. The ‘Dutch disease’ would soon follow, but meanwhile the sun set on the social-democratic age of coal, and the neoliberal age of oil dawned.

The resource switch turned out to be difficult, but those who had dreamt of ridding themselves of coal and miners were lucky with oil and oilmen. From 1981 onwards, Great Britain exported more oil than it imported. Oil and gas improved the balance of trade, reviving long-forgotten mercantile ideas. Unlike the coal industry, with its ever-present unions and long-term contracts, the oil industry thrived on free trade. As ships switched to diesel fuel and power stations to gas, mines were privatised or closed; the last deep mine in England closed in 2015. The mining towns of Great Britain have become some of the poorest places in Europe.

The mines and miners played a leading role in the liberation movement in Eastern Europe. The key moment in Solidarity’s struggle in Poland was the 1981 strike in the Silesian mine of Wujek, which ended with the shooting of demonstrators – nine miners were killed. The first legal strike in Soviet history occurred in 1989 among miners in the Kuznetsk Basin in Siberia. When ‘reforms’ failed, miners were more active and cohesive than other workers. But no strike can prevent an economic slump. Having oil and gas as alternatives, the government could ignore the threats of the miners and, moreover, squeeze their whole industry until their power was undermined and forgotten.

Nowadays, coal is extracted mostly from open pits; working on the surface is less labour-intensive and less dangerous but causes more damage to the environment. Open pits have changed the tradition of mining collectives: no danger underground, no solidarity on the surface; no solidarity, no strikes; no strikes, no power. In the 2010s, coal produced about a third of the energy harnessed by humankind, but it is responsible for fully half of carbon emissions. Per unit of energy, coal emits much more carbon than does oil or gas. Mines and coal power plants also produce more pollution than almost any other industry, and this pollution is connected to the aerosol spread of viruses; in 2020, mining areas of Poland, for example, suffered much more severely from COVID than other regions. Produced largely by coal, our ecological crisis continues the miners’ strikes by other means, and of course the earth’s strike will be more effective. By 2015 the coal sector of the American economy had already lost three-quarters of its capitalisation. Eurasia still depends on coal, but things are changing. Great Britain has pledged to close all its coal-fired power stations by 2025, and Germany, by 2038. It has been calculated that, in order to keep global warming within its internationally agreed limits, 92 per cent of the known deposits of coal will never be extracted or burnt.

Note

Notes

1   Wrigley, Energy and the English Industrial Revolution . 2   Nef, ‘An early energy crisis and its consequences’. 3   Malm, Fossil Capital ; Reynolds, Stronger than a Hundred Men . 4   Jevons, The Coal Question , p. vii. 5   Pomeranz, The Great Divergence ; Jones, Agriculture and the Industrial Revolution ; de Vries, European Urbanization . 6   Engels, The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 , p. 248. 7   Gregory, The Miners and British Politics . 8   Mitchell, Carbon Democracy . 9   Gillingham, Coal, Steel, and the Rebirth of Europe ; Milward, The Reconstruction of Western Europe .

THIRTEEN

Oil