This cartoon, from XKCD.com, came out on Monday and alerted me to the final closure of the power station at Ratcliffe-on-Soar, the UK’s last coal-burning power production site. Effectively digging up and burning an average of 3″ of land seems a pretty remarkable figure and I haven’t thoroughly double checked it but Randall Munro, the artist, is normally extremely meticulous about the smallest of details. I did find another site suggesting we have burned a mere 4.6 billion tonnes but that was specifically for coal burning power plants since 1882. Monro’s figure is for coal produced since 1853 and that would include uses outside of power plants (eg. direct heating, steam locomotives) and exports. Even if we do need to scale the total back, we’d still end up with 2-3cm, which would be noticeable if we could put all the coal back and instead scrape that amount off the surface of the land!

The UK had its first coal-free day in 2018 and has been running coal-lite since a couple of years before that. Perhaps the air will feel a bit clearer? Ratcliffe is only a few miles up the road from where I live although, speaking of roads, I suspect that is a more significant source of the local pollution I notice.