Humanity is at a crossroads and so is the North East. We either urgently shake off our addiction to fossil fuels or humanity faces a very difficult future, which may see the great experiment that is civilisation collapse.
In the Northeast, we need to quickly put in place a just transition to a low carbon economy, and a green industrial economy, having been at the forefront of the first fossil fuel-based revolution.
So, how can we learn from our proud heritage of coal mining and innovation?
That is what the short, but important book Releasing the Genie of Coal by Peter Stark and Bill Lancaster seeks to examine.
The importance of the North Sast and the Derwent Valley in particular, the ‘Land of Oak and Iron’, to the development of modern fossil fuel-based industry is outlined by Bill Lancaster in a short essay at the end of the book, discussing how the genie of coal was released here in the Northeast, when the Derwent valley was the ‘El Dorado of the British coal trade”. With the regional engineering innovations and the establishment of institutions such as the North of England Institute of Mining Engineers, the coal industry was to be developed around the world. This was to bring great benefits to humanity, but, as we know, in the long-term also great dangers.
Climate change
After the obligatory foreword, the book begins with chapter about Climate Change and the centrality of coal in that dangerous phenomenon. Stark quotes from the report from Cop 25 in Madrid in 2019 that:
“Three major reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on land, on the oceans and cryosphere, and on the 1.5 degrees Celsius climate goal – each confirm that we are knowingly destroying the very support systems keeping us alive. And indeed, we are. In several regions of the world, coal power plants continue to be planned and built in large numbers.
Either we stop this addiction to coal or all our efforts to tackle climate change will be doomed. And as the UN Environment Programme has just revealed, countries are planning to produce fossil fuels over the next decade at lover double the level that is consistent with keeping temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius”.
The warning was clear years ago, yet we have now already reached the1.5 degrees barrier. Stark then goes on to discuss the role that the Northeast played in causing the Climate Crisis.
Iron Works
We are taken through the 18th century development of Iron works and waggon ways in the Northeast and more specifically along the Derwent Valley outside modern-day Gateshead, up to the local examples of the use of early steam.
In the19th century the Northeast saw the world’s first development of deep mining and of course the world’s first steam railways.
Mining and Mechanical Engineers
Next up is a section about the importance of the North of England Institute of Mining and Mechanical Engineers, as its members lead the way in developing the technology for the production and use of coal that would make it such an important feature of the industrial revolution that would spread across the world and transform it at the same time.
Coal production
The 20th century saw peak coal production, with 230 000 miners employed on the Great Northern coalfield in 1913, the development of the steam turbine, at Parsons works in Heaton and the world’s first coal fired power station, all in the Northeast of England.
That was not all; in the wider industrial context there was also what is described as the” unique contribution of Teesside”, due to the coal being used to heat local deposits of iron ore and rock salt to develop technologies in iron and steel production and the chemical industry, especially after the establishment of Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) in 1926.
Dangers
However, despite the Northeast exporting many of these technological innovations around the world, including a Parsons generator being delivered to the Australian city of Melbourne, there was a downside. The work in the mines and in other heavy industries in the region was often dangerous. This had enormous effects on Northeast workers, families and communities, with around 20 000 miners killed in County Durham in large disasters or individual tragedies and thousands more in Northumberland. There was also a huge cost to the natural environment and Stark notes that, “using the phrase coined by Naomi Klein, the mining communities of the North East lived in the first ‘sacrificial land’”, while by 1981, “it was estimated that 66 million tonnes of colliery waste had been tipped on the ‘black beaches’ of Durham affecting marine life over four miles out”.
All this danger and environmental degradation saw a response from the people in the region in the form of communitarian values and a radical politics. This was seen in the trade unions and the cooperatives that were established in the second half of the 19th century and in other ways that people helped each other, such as the development of Aged Miners Homes and collective insurance schemes, which arguably were the first version of the Welfare State, later rolled out across the country by the 1945 Attlee government.
Closure of mines
Then the whole story seemed to come to a shuddering halt by the turn of the 21st century, with the closing of the last mines, clinging on along the North Sea coast. This was followed by a decidedly unjust transition as redundant miners were encouraged to sign on the sick, to keep unemployment figures down and apart from Nissan at Sunderland and some call centre jobs, very few new industries were brought in to replace the jobs lost, not only in mining, but in iron and steel production, shipbuilding and all the other industries, which supplied them.
As Stark himself puts it: “The Northeast was arguably the first into the era of heavy industry, among the very first out, and now with hard-won experience of the consequences for society, economy, communities and culture of such a sudden and traumatic loss of jobs. There was underinvestment in new physical infrastructure and human capital – health, education and training. The Northeast, therefore, began the 21st century on already weak foundations after an unjust transition to an insecure and too often impoverished future for too many”.
All this leads Stark to rightly call upon us to consider and respect our inheritance of the past and to address the future. It will be vital to maintain our proud scientific and technological traditions in the Northeast as we move into a future increasingly dominated by the Climate Crisis, while also reviving our communitarian values, so that people can work together to overcome problems, as they did so successfully in the past.
Community spirit
This is an important book, which reminds us Peter Stark puts it, that “the spread of ‘carboniferous capitalism’ around the world in the 19th and 20th centuries appeared to offer the prospect of cheap energy, power and prosperity for all, and it did indeed provide unimaginable benefits globally over time (and vast fortunes to a few), but – as is now known- at a potentially deadly price to humanity and our planet’s ecology”. That carboniferous capitalism of course, began in Northeast England.
It is also a book which reminds us that the community spirit on the Great Northern coalfield and the heritage of innovation that we had in this region, are two parts of the mining heritage that we must revive, as we head further into the Climate Crisis.
New government
With the election of the new Labour government, which holds all but one seat in the Northeast, it is perhaps time for the just transition to a new greener economy, which we have been waiting for, for so long. We have a heritage to be proud of and need to revive our communitarian values and spirit of innovation, while developing the new green energy forms to replace the coal that was mined in such huge quantities, in such difficult and dangerous conditions.
