The End of Coal, featuring Dr Andrew Seaton

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD (INTRO)

Hello and welcome to Series 3 of The Greatest Good, a UCL Press Podcast. I’m your host, Professor Philip Schofield, and Director of the Bentham Project here at UCL. 

Jeremy Bentham, and 18^th– and 19^th-century philosopher, was the intellectual inspiration for the founding of University College London.

In this series, we focus on the intersection of Bentham’s ideas with current thinking on climate justice, in conversation with leading UCL academics.

DR ANDREW SEATON (INTRO)

We burn more coal in the world now than we’ve ever done in human history. So, last year, 2024, I think it was about 8.77 billion tonnes of coal that was burned

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

Andrew, welcome to the podcast, so would you just introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your research?

DR ANDREW SEATON

Sure. So, my name is Andrew Seaton. I’m based in the history department here at UCL. I’m a historian of modern Britain, so from about 1800 to the present. And I specialise in political history, social history, and also the history of medicine and the environment. 

So, I’m writing a book at the moment that’s called The Ends of Coal, which is an environmental history of Britain’s relationship to this really crucial resource of the modern world. And the idea of it is to try and follow the threads really of where coal went and what it did in a way that sort of gets us beyond that sort of rise and fall story that most people will have about Britain and coal, where coal was really, really important to Britain’s 19th century and its industrialisation and then sort of declined in the 20th century. Obviously, kind of epitomised by the miners’ strike in 1984 or 1985. So, you have this kind of rise and fall narrative, which in many respects is true around the world, and sort of production levels within Britain.

But, of course, coal is more than just how much of it is produced, it shapes the landscape, it shapes health, it shaped politics, it shaped Britain’s relationship to the wider world and I’m trying to sort of capture those broader significances really with this new work. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

Right and the shift therefore from coal to oil. You talk about the ends of coal, are we really finished with coal with fossil fuels? I mean would you link coal and oil together that just shifting from coal to oil wasn’t in a sense made much difference in terms of let’s say climate? 

DR ANDREW SEATON

Yeah I mean this is a real debate at the moment really within the scholarship in energy history, studies of the Anthropocene, the kind of geological era that we’re supposed to live in where humans have become an agent, a natural agent in themselves. 

There’s a lot of pressure being placed on the idea of energy transition. So kind of what you just described there from going from coal to oil and then maybe from oil to a green future. In recent years, scholars have really sort of problematised that narrative because as you’ve suggested, with the kind of advent of oil, if you will, on a mass scale in the world, it wasn’t as if the coal went away. 

We burn more coal in the world now than we’ve ever done in human history. So last year, 2024, I think it was about 8.77 billion tonnes of coal that was burned, which absolutely dwarfs the period that we would often assume to be where we would burn the most coal, which would be maybe the 19th century, the Victorian era, maybe the early 20th century, the amount of coal that’s being burned now, it absolutely dwarfs that number. 

So you know, scholars have really sort of thought then about, okay, what is this term that we’re working with, energy transition? And the consensus that seems to be building now is that the history of humans’ relationship to natural resources like coal, like oil, like wood, like nuclear fission, all these sources of energy, isn’t one of transition, where you go from one stage to another to another, but rather that it’s about addition. So you layer on top oil on top of coal, you layer renewable energy on top of oil. And there’s also very interesting work that’s done about the kind of relationship between those different resources as well, that they aren’t necessarily bounded separate things. 

So to take the example of coal in the 19th century, when Britain was really expanding its coal mines, many people have sort of historically seen this as a kind of move away from wood. But actually, wood remained absolutely vital to producing coal because you couldn’t have a coal mine without having all of the wood beams in that mine to hold it up. 

You needed wood on trains and so on to transport the coal. So there was this kind of and there remains this relationship between these resources, coal, oil, wood, whatever it might be, that is a kind of symbiotic relationship. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

I mean the amount of coal that’s still being used is quite staggering and I know China mines lots of coal. So but we also hear about coal being mined in Poland and even though you know we don’t mine coal now we’re still importing a certain amount of coal and what they call biomass. 

I mean is that helping? Should we have a couple of mines still open rather than paying for the transporting of the coal that is still necessary for the iron smelters, steel, making steel at Skunthorpe? 

DR ANDREW SEATON

Yeah, so globally the sort of highest producer and sort of consumer of coal is as he said China followed by India after that. 

Australia also has a very large role to play in the global coal economy. I think it’s the second largest exporter of coal. So even though Australia does consume a lot of coal itself, the population is quite low. So they export a lot of their coal overseas. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

Where does it go to from Australia? 

DR ANDREW SEATON

So yeah, it goes to a lot of those main consumers of coal. 

So China, India historically, those kind of tiger economies in Asia, like Japan, South Korea and so on, they historically have relied a lot on Australian coal as well. And one of the things that I’m trying to do in my work, thinking about Britain’s historical relationship to coal, is thinking about places like Australia that of course were British colonies, right? 

And those coal industries were jump-started by British involvement in the late 18th century, the 19th century and after that as well. And so another thing I’ve sort of found very interesting in my work is the way that Britain exported coal expertise to places like India in the 60s and the 70s under the guise of development. 

So, you know, the 60s and 70s being these really important decades for international aid, in development politics, in trying to uplift countries that were former colonies of European powers and helping them to industrialise. 

The way that a lot of policymakers in development thought about that was that, you know, you needed to help these countries industrialise by giving them sufficient energy generation, electricity generation, and the way to do that was coal. 

And so what I’ve seen by going to the National Archives in Kew in London, which is where the records of the National Coal Board, which was the nationalised British industry, looking at those records, you see a lot of links in those decades, the 60s, 70s, between Britain and places like India, exporting all kinds of different expertise, whether that might be geology, depth mining, but also forms of technology like long wall mining, which is a kind of modern form of coal mining. Britain played a role in exporting those kinds of technologies to India. 

And so to your point about steel, now we’re kind of in a situation where Britain has closed its deep coal mines. There’s a couple open cast mines that are open, but the amount that they produce is very small. 

And with the closure of that, the steel plant in Skunthorpe, very interestingly, that came on the back of last September, where the last coal fired power plant was shut down in Britain. And there was a lot of celebration, right? 

Keir Starmer gave a speech about how Britain had ended coal and how great that was. And then just a few months later, Britain is re-importing coal from Australia to keep a steel furnace going. So this idea that Britain has ended its relationship to coal I think we can say is it is quite dubious. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

Right and I understand you’ve been recently to Newcastle in Australia. 

DR ANDREW SEATON

Yeah. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

Presumably called after Newcastle in England because it’s the place where coal was discovered and it’s still a centre of heavy industry in Australia, is that right? So, what were you going to learn by going out to Newcastle? 

DR ANDREW SEATON

Yeah, so I went to Newcastle – I’d really recommend going it’s a really really nice place to go, it’s about two hours up the coast from Sydney up the east coast of Australia. As you said it’s kind of named after the original British Newcastle because there were large coal deposits that were discovered at the end of the 18th century in what became Newcastle in Australia. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

Do you know Bentham’s connection to that discovery of coal? 

DR ANDREW SEATON

No I don’t actually know. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

The people who were supposed to have discovered coal were some escapees from New South Wales they left in an open boat at the end of March 1791 and eventually sailed all the way to West Timor at about three months voyage in an open boat eight adults two children I think it’s about three thousand miles and there’s a description of the journey by a man called James Martin and his memorandums have been published by UCL Press edited by my Bentham project colleague Tim Causer and apparently a couple of days out from Sydney they stopped in what they call Fortunate Creek which is now thought to be near Newcastle and discovered coal lying on the ground now this original account by James Martin was he’s now in the Bentham papers at UCL Bentham had this great interest in New South Wales because of his interest in punishment and the opposed the whole establishment of the colony at New South Wales on the grounds that the form of punishment there didn’t meet any of the requisite ends of punishment and rather the prisoners should be sent to the Panopticon prison that he hoped to build in London. 

But anyway, for some reason, Bentham got hold of these memorandums of James Martin, this original document, and it’s in there that they talk about finding coal at the end of March 1791. So that’s the tangential connection to Bentham. 

But is there a sort of a steel industry? They’re in Newcastle and they’re still mining and sending, is that from where they’re exporting the coal? Because I always thought it was sort of Western Australia where all the mining. 

DR ANDREW SEATON

Yeah, so originally, as you suggested with that really interesting story about Bentham’s relationship, there is this kind of discovery of coal and the government of New South Wales get excited about it. 

They open a kind of government. coal mine, but eventually in the 1820s, 1824, coal mining in Newcastle was given entirely in monopoly to a chartered stock company called the Australian Agricultural Company, a company that still exists in Australia today. 

And this company was intended, as the name would suggest, to get involved in agriculture. But they also were very interested in the coal deposits in Newcastle. And so they were the company that actually brought the coal industry in Australia as a whole into maturity. 

And they relied a lot, I’m sure, to Bentham’s annoyance on convict labour to do that work. Now the convicts that were sent to Australia, many of them were very skilled. Some of them were engineers. Some of them had knowledge of depth mining and infrastructure or whatever it might be. 

And the Australian Agricultural Company relied on that kind of expertise to get those coal mines off the ground in Newcastle. Now fast forward into the 20th century, those coal mines mature, the monopoly ends for the Australian Agricultural Company. 

Other companies are allowed to extract coal from that region. There’s a huge steel mill that’s built in Newcastle. I think in the early 20th century it’s actually the largest steel producer in the British Empire at that point. 

Once you get into that after the Second World War, a lot of the mines in Newcastle either become unprofitable because they’ve been over mined or they’ve become exhausted. And coal production in the Newcastle region shifts up what is now called the Hunter Valley. 

So Newcastle sits at the bottom of the Hunter Valley. So I was doing a lot of work looking at those early 19th century mines, but I was also interested in that later 20th century story. So if you rent a car and go up to the Hunter Valley, there’s two things that you can see. 

First is you can see… incredible wineries. It’s one of Australia’s main wine-producing regions, so you can have very nice wine and nice lunch. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

So not like South Wales in that respect. 

DR ANDREW SEATON

Not like our South Wales in that respect, no. 

But the other thing that you can see is absolutely vast open pit coal mining. And you take these roads and on the side of the road the companies that own these open pit mines, some of them Australian, some of them internationally owned, China owns a lot of these open pit mines, they’re fenced off so that they don’t want you to see them. 

There’s a lot of signs warning you not to use drones and so on, environmentalists obviously very interested in these sites. But the scale of them means that they just can’t hide them and there’ll be points where the road dips and you’ll get this view of really this kind of lunar moon-like landscape. 

These absolutely vast excavated areas where you have mining. machines, drag lines as they’re known, these are the largest machines on the planet that basically excavate vast amounts of the topsoil. They kind of literally drag it off to get at the coal which in this area lies quite close to the surface. 

You’re not drilling too far down into the ground, you’re kind of dragging off the surface and excavating that. That coal is then put on trains and sent all the way down to Newcastle, that previous prior site of coal excavation where it’s put on ships and the harbour of Newcastle itself is a kind of classic story of deindustrialisation, it’s been regenerated, there’s nice bars, there’s nice restaurants on the waterfront, 

you know you can have a drink on the waterfront and you can watch these Chinese, these Japanese ships come into the harbour, go up to where that coal has been trained down to that port, put on the ship and then taken out to go to those countries. 

So it really is a kind of really interesting place for that layering of that earlier 19th century story with the way that coal is extracted and transported. There’s no current law in Australia which means that these companies once they’ve extracted the coal have to do anything with the huge chasms that they’ve left, which is quite different to Britain where in the 60s the National Coal Board was actually a kind of pioneer in regenerating a lot of this land, you know, filling it back in with the topsoil, planting trees, using techniques in soil science to kind of regenerate the land from its acidity. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

The National Coal Board was a, as it said, it’s a national organisation which was a non-profit organisation, so it wasn’t supposed to lose money, but it wasn’t supposed to make money – whereas the private mines were the most abusive organisations you can imagine. 

But talking about environmental concerns, how far back does environmental concern with the effect of mining? in Go. I mean, is it something you find in the 19th century? I’m thinking of people like Ruskin, for instance. 

DR ANDREW SEATON

Absolutely, yeah. There’s a long, almost from the get-go, there’s concerns about the environmental harms of this form of extraction. Of course, important to keep in mind that the ways that they were describing it were different to how we would describe it now, right? 

The word environment didn’t have the kind of connotations that it does have now, but certainly these concerns with, you know, yeah, people like Wordsworth, Ruskin, really concerned with the kind of despoilization of the landscape in Britain. 

You also have campaigns within cities, Manchester, Birmingham, these large industrial cities where you had whole-scale industry, which was premised on burning coal for power. You also see clean air campaigns in the 19th century within those kind of urban environments as well, which do, interestingly, marshal kind of early thinking about climate on a local level and what does burning fossil fuels do to that. 

And then the other thing that’s really interesting about the 19th century as well is that you can also, if you look at the science, you can actually see some early scientists inching their way towards what we would now describe as the greenhouse effect. 

There was an Irish chemist called John Tyndall, who in 1859 gave this famous lecture at the Royal Society, where he basically burned some coal gas and he showed the way that heat would be trapped in a tube. 

And Prince Albert was in attendance when he gave this lecture, sort of showing in miniature the way that if you scaled that up on a planetary scale, the way that heat would be trapped if you burned carbon on a large scale. 

So these kinds of warnings about burning fossil fuels, and which we now would describe as kind of environmental concerns, were there in the 19th century. They didn’t move into the mainstream in a way that they did much later. 

But there is a question there about if these concerns have been there for a long time. We aren’t uniquely enlightened now in 2025, and those stupid people in the 19th century, they didn’t know what they were doing. 

Why weren’t those concerns about burning fossil fuels acted upon is, I think, an interesting historical question. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

One might say for the same reasons they do not know, because of the interests of people who were making fortunes out of finding them. 

DR ANDREW SEATON

Yeah, that’s certainly one explanation, right? 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

I was thinking the other thing is the political need to please populations. 

DR ANDREW SEATON

Yeah, I mean, there’s all kinds of explanations, right? A part of it is about capitalism and wealth and, you know, who holds power in society and where that wealth is drawn from in its relationship to fossil fuels. Others would be, you know, for all the people like Tyndall that existed, there were competing scientific understandings of climate at the time. 

And actually, for a lot of Victorians, what they were worried about was not global warming, but actually global freezing. They were coming out of, you know, the mini ice age, as it’s known, in the early modern period, and they were worried the world might slip back into that and start freezing up again. 

It wasn’t an uncontested landscape that Tyndall was trying to voice his ideas in. But as you’ve said, there’s many echoes with today. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

What about William Stanley Jevons, The Coal Question? Because didn’t Jevons have a connection with UCL? 

DR ANDREW SEATON

He did, yeah. So William Stanley Jevons was an economist and political philosopher, really. He was born in Liverpool in the 1830s. His father had an iron-making company. He came from a middle-class background, but some difficult familial circumstances. 

His dad’s iron company entered bankruptcy after the end of the railway boom. So he kind of had these sort of ideas of scarcity, if you will, from a young age. He goes to UCL, as you said, and he studies mathematics here at UCL, and chemistry as well. 

He then goes, after he graduates from UCL, he actually goes to Australia for a while, another Australian link there. And in the 1850s, he’s an assayer at the Royal Mint in Australia, so he’s checking the kind of quality of metals used in coinage. 

But he, at that point, gets very interested in political philosophy. He’s reading Bentham, he’s reading Malthus, he’s reading Mill, and he wants to sort of go back to Britain and make a name for himself. 

And he makes a name for himself with an 1865 book, which is called The Coal Question, an inquiry concerning the progress of the nation and the probable exhaustion of our coal mines, which, as you can get from this lovely, very long 19th century titles, which tell you exactly what they’re gonna do, this is a book that is, first of all, in awe of the power that coal has, and has had in Britain. 

So, this is written in the 1860s, and sees coal as absolutely fundamental to Britain’s wealth, both at home and overseas in the empire. But there’s a problem, Jevons argues. He argues that population pressures in Britain are basically causing too much coal to be extracted, too much coal to be used, and that’s going to exhaust the coal mines in Britain. 

You’re gonna have to go deeper and deeper underground to get coal seams, is it gonna become unprofitable? And coal production, he actually predicts in the book, is gonna be replaced by America, by discoveries in Appalachia. 

That’s gonna become the centre of global coal production, he predicts. So, it’s quite a gloomy book, it’s obviously very informed by Malthus and Thomas Malthus’ ideas of population and how that creates resource scarcity. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

So, this is the idea that population will outstrip subsistence? 

DR ANDREW SEATON

Exactly. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

It’s normally talking about food, but Jevons is applying that to coal?

DR ANDREW SEATON

Exactly, yeah exactly. So, he was a big supporter of emigration actually, particularly to places like Australia. You know you needed to get people out of, quote unquote, over-populated Britain, send them out into the empire, that would reduce some of these pressures on resources. 

But Jevons was also a liberal and for that reason he, you know one solution to this dilemma might have been to put tariffs on sending coal, exporting coal out of the country right, to try and keep it in the country and save this precious resource. 

But he thought that that would actually harm the whole… Political economy of the way that Britain worked and it would actually cause more harm than good.

But it was a very popular book and very influential It sold out in its first run the Prime Minister William Gladstone invited Jevons to number 10 Downing Street to discuss it with him and it kind of echoed after that point actually as a really important touchstone in thinking about scarcity and natural resources 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

It’s really interesting and because I know I know in economic terms, there’s often said -there’s the story that the idea of modern economic develops from Bentham through Jevons to Alford Marshall. And I’m obviously thinking about questions of utility. 

Yeah, and Malthus had a big impact on Bentham as well because… Well, the whole idea of political economy change, following Malthus and about how to deal with population pressure, and I suppose in a sense, what you were saying earlier about more coal being used now than ever before. I mean, there are more people, and we all have greater demands for energy – although people in America and Europe are using much more energy per person than people in other parts of the world. So, is this just going to get worse and worse as there are more and more people and more and more…you know, people want more and more energy?

DR ANDREW SEATON

Well, it’s interesting because if you look at the history of environmentalism a lot of the key thinkers in that intellectual movement have been concerned with this question of population and this idea of scarcity and so, you know if we go back to the 1960s the 1970s really where there were key thinkers and key reports that basically argued that kind of overpopulation was the problem and that was the heart of the environmental ills that the planet faced. And that was the thing that you needed to tackle. 

So, to give a couple examples of that, one would be a guy called Paul Ehrlich who was an American biologist. He published a book in 1968 called The Population Bomb, which became an international global bestseller. 

He was invited on to chat shows. He was interviewed by all the main newspapers, and so on, really got a lot of fame for this book. And he basically argued that rising population was causing resource scarcity, which would then lead to essentially nuclear annihilation. 

States would be entering into conflict with each other because of food, because of energy resources, because of water, whatever it might be. Another one would be the Limits to Growth Report in 1972. This was a report that was released that also pointed to population growth and resource scarcity. 

And that had a lot of influence among economists, actually. So, this idea about population growth has really played a role in thinking about environmental problems. But as you’ve pointed out there, we really have to think about who is using energy on a per capita basis, right, like the average European, the average American, even now compared to the average Indian or Chinese person is consuming more energy by orders of magnitude more than people in Asia. 

And so, you know, sometimes when we think about energy resources and scarcity and population, it can sometimes be applied in quite a, both blunt and sometimes quite dangerous way where, you know, it sort of fuels arguments for population control, which obviously has a very vexed history in the name of the environment, which I think historically we have to be a little bit careful of doing. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

Yeah, so it’s about, not just numbers of people, but how much they consume. Just coming back to the title of your book, The Ends of Coal, can you tell us about what you mean by the ‘ends’, plural? 

DR ANDREW SEATON 

Yeah, so in the UK, we have this kind of rise and fall narrative where we have a sort of start point and an end point. 

And the start point would be industrialization in the 19th century, the application of coal into industry in a large scale, Britain industrializes, coal production peaks in 1913 in the UK, and then after that point it declines, even with the nationalization of the industry in 1947. 

And then you have pit closures, you have production going down, and then you have the miners’ strike in 1984, 1985. Now to a lot of people, both historians, political scientists, commentators in the media, that was the end of coal, right, when Margaret Thatcher defeated the mining unions, and after that point the industry was broken and became privatized in the 1990s. 

There’s large parts of that story that are true, but what I’m trying to do with this new book is not just map a kind of end of call, this singular moment of finality, but rather follow the multiple ways that it shapes politics, society, the environment and the landscape, people’s health. 

So, I’ve given you a few examples of those today, but another would be on the topic of health, mining communities today, people that are suffering from pneumoconiosis, lung condition from working down the mines, there was no end of coal for them, they still carry the legacies of those conditions today. 

Within mining communities themselves, so we’re talking about the Northeast, we’re talking about South Wales, the rates of things like depression, the use of anti-depressants in those communities because of job losses and so on, is much, much higher than the rest of the country. 

So that’s one example of where… that story of a kind of rise and fall, an end of coal in 1984, you know it’s very, very precise these narratives work, I think doesn’t actually tell us the full story and so what I’m trying to do in this new book is situate that story about production within those wider threads, those wider ends of coal. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

Yeah, no I mean I come from a mining village, an ex-mining village in Lancashire. The last pit was closed in the 1960s but relatives used to say to me, ‘you mustn’t go down the pits, get an education.’

But I think, in a sense, Lancashire did better because it closed the pits earlier and there were alternatives, whereas you’d sort of look at some of the places in Durham, Nottingham, Yorkshire which you know the mining villages, like you’re saying the problems are so much more acute because the mines closed later and there wasn’t quite the car industry to go to. 

DR ANDREW SEATON

Yeah. So, it’s all, again, about timing. A lot of it’s about timing, because I think if your mine shut in 1965 that was very different to its shutting in 1985 because the National Coal Board and a lot of historians describe this as a kind of moral economy that the National Coal Board operated where you know there were more coal mines shut under Harold Wilson, the Labour Prime Minister than there were under Margaret Thatcher, but when those closures were happening there was serious thinking about ‘okay, where are these workers going to go, what other industries can they be put into?’ and they, you know, a lot of people either found different jobs within the coal industry themselves or they were helped to find a job in a car factory or a textile factory or whatever it might be. 

In 1985 that kind of thinking just wasn’t going on. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

Yeah, we were still sort of an industrial country in the 60s whereas 20 years later it was a very different situation. I mean, I suppose you could say well we’ve made some progress – but have we? 

You know you think of you know we’ve got wind power now. know, you can sign up to power companies and say, oh, you want green fuel. I mean, is that making any difference? 

DR ANDREW SEATON

Yeah. I mean, I think there’s obviously different ways you could spin the story. 

And I think one is that you could go down a very pessimistic line and you could say that, well, yes, the amount of renewables is going up. And if you looked at a chart, that would be true. The amount of renewables that we produce in the UK using wind or water or whatever it might be in the 2020s is much, much higher than it was even 15, 20 years ago. 

And that is obviously good. But then when you put things in a global perspective, again, we go back to that point about additions rather than just moving from coal and oil to renewables, right? Yes, there are more renewable energy, but there’s also more coal and oil. 

So, you can go down quite a sort of pessimistic road like that. But I think undoubtedly is difficult to look at the rise of renewables and say that is not what we need to do. Clearly, we need to have more of that. 

But I think one of the things that really and hopefully the historical work that I’m doing will help us think about this a little bit more is really getting at this idea of what we mean when we say decarbonisation. 

To go back to that example that you said about the steel mill in the UK, we can be quite quick to celebrate the supposed moments of decarbonisation when actually there are all these intimate links with industries that still rely on fossil fuels. 

So, to give you another, and it would be plastics, the amount of coal that is producing plastics in the world is incredible. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

We just assume it’s some oil plastic, don’t we? 

DR ANDREW SEATON

Yeah, exactly. And a lot of it is, that’s certainly true but the energy generation in places like where we get the plastics from, so again we’re going back to China, a lot of it is also derived from coal. 

It’s about 55% of electricity generation in China is from coal. So, these big factories that are making all of the consumer goods that we rely on is either chemically derived from fossil fuel products, plastics, or in their production is also made using fossil fuels. 

And so, I think there’s a question there, about when we’re talking about decarbonisation and the steps that we can make in the future, we often just think about electricity generation and that is obviously important and for the good and we do need to think about that. 

But we also need to think about those other things like steel production, cement production, plastics, all of these other kind of materials that are still incredibly bound up with fossil fuel use. How can we either find replacements for fossil fuels there or probably more likely how can we reduce consumption, particularly in areas like plastic, I think. You know, so you can also get some big payoffs there I think as well.

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

Is it important to say like, well, we can all do a bit?

DR ANDREW SEATON

I think so, yeah, you know there is an argument out there that, ‘okay, it doesn’t really matter what we do in Britain because other countries are going to outpace us in terms of burning fossil fuels and so on’. But hopefully, as I’ll show in my work, countries like Britain have a deep historical relationship to this problem, right – the extraction of fossil fuels, the forms of politics and ideas that came about through that, the health legacies, the environmental legacies. And so, I think there’s a responsibility there that we have in a country like Britain, to be part of thinking about what comes next. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

Andrew, thank you so much. That was really interesting. 

DR ANDREW SEATON

Thanks for having me.