Vince Cable stressed to the Lib Dem Spring Conference last week that “There is now a climate emergency.  But you wouldn’t think so from the complacent attitude of the government.” Quite the statement given that this year CO2 emissions have fallen to their lowest levels since 1888…

He might want to tell that to his own councillors, who in Cumbria this week unanimously approved a new £165 million coal mine set to extract coal along the Copeland coastline. The Liberal Democrat chair of Cumbria County Council’s development committee, Geoff Cook, said:

“We felt that the need for coking coal, the number of jobs on offer and the chance to remove contamination outweighed concerns about climate change and local amenity.”

Some ‘climate emergency’…