Port Talbot steelworks job losses: We can no longer fail to count the cost of greenhouse gases – Professor Anthony Seaton

Humans have burned fossil fuels for centuries without a thought for the consequences, but they have already caught up with us

Driving west from Cardiff, you pass along the southern limit of the ice that once covered all of Scotland and most of England and which finally melted some 12,000 years ago, allowing the repopulation of our islands by Homo sapiens. The land revealed contained rich deposits of coal and iron ore which humans were to exploit over the succeeding millennia, initially learning to burn coal for heat and eventually to smelt iron ore, introducing the Iron Age about 800 BCE.

Coal, iron ore and lime to remove impurities were smelted to produce metallic iron which could simply be hammered into shape, as it was in the water mills on the Almond River in north Edinburgh, or melted and cast. Combined with carbon from charcoal, it made the stronger and more flexible steel. In the early 18th century, this process was improved by using coke made by baking coal. Industrialist Andrew Carnegie saw to it that steel was to become essential to human development, as exemplified by the Forth Bridge near his birthplace.

As you approach Swansea on your drive, you see between you and the bay ahead, a massive, smoky and fiery aggregation of buildings and blast furnaces. To your right, the hillside is bare, the vegetation killed by the fumes from the Port Talbot steelworks, a major contributor to both pollution and climate change, but also an enterprise that employs a good proportion of the people in the town.

Less polluting way to make steel

Few families there will be unaffected by the planned changes to the steel plant, some of whom may already have previously been affected by the closure of the coal mines in the valleys to the north. The human suffering from such closures is familiar to many across Britain in places that once prospered from heavy industry. The suffering is unevenly distributed, affecting the poorest the most. It is one of the unaccounted-for costs of capitalism.

There is now a much less polluting way of making steel, by melting scrap, of which there is an abundance, steel being eminently recyclable. This uses an electric arc but requires no coal or coke and far fewer workers. Ideally, as in Scandinavia, green electricity should be used and in Port Talbot there is a missed opportunity – the Severn Estuary has the highest tides in Britain.

There was a time when there appeared to be an almost unending supply of cheap energy from coal, oil and gas. Then, just after the Second World War, we started to worry about the effects of air pollution, notably on the lung and heart. We noted that these afflicted poorer people more than the rich.

In 1989, I was asked to chair a UK Government committee on air quality standards. Over a decade, we advised successive governments on protective standards for all the major pollutants as part of a national drive to improve air quality in our towns and cities. The fall in thee concentrations of particles, sulphur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide and carcinogens in UK urban air has been gratifying since then, largely from action on sources such as vehicles but unnoticed by those who do not remember the winter smogs of the 1950s.

Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth

Two pollutants, however, we ignored – carbon dioxide, since it had no immediate effect on health, and methane which seemed to occur in trivial concentrations in urban air. By 2000, when our air quality recommendations had passed into UK and EU law, I had become increasingly concerned about global temperature rises and was lecturing to medical students on climate change as part of my teaching on environment and health.

In 2006, I read Al Gore’s book, An Inconvenient Truth, and had a conversation with him at the Edinburgh International Book Festival in which he encouraged me to help spread the word. As an undergraduate, he had studied under a leading scientist in this field, Roger Revelle, and having retired as US Vice-President was going back to his scientific roots, educating the public on the subject. Since then, I have done my best to do the same.

Al Gore’s book had a subtitle – “the planetary emergency of global warming and what we can do about it”. This returns me to Port Talbot, the planned 2,800 job losses at the steelworks, and what it means to all of us. It is an example of what happens when the real cost of an enterprise is shown to include its damage to our environment and to us.

The bell tolls for us all

The carbon dioxide, particles and carcinogens generated over decades from the combustion of coal in the furnaces and coke ovens have cost human, animal and plant lives and health and we, the beneficiaries of the steel produced, have never considered this cost. Some of this accumulated cost falls on the poor individuals to be made redundant, but most of it makes its contribution to the mounting cost of halting the remorseless effects of rising air and sea temperatures.

Like most of the goods and harms of life on earth, these costs are distributed unevenly. The two main greenhouse gases produced by mankind, carbon dioxide and methane, are derived mainly from the combustion of fossil fuels, by drilling and mining, by agriculture and from landfill sites. Half of these gases are produced by the wealthiest one per cent of the world’s population, comprising those who earn more than £80,000 annually. The costs are borne by all those whose homes and land, whose way of living, are destroyed by heat, floods and storms, usually the world’s poorest.

That is what Port Talbot means to all of us. Ask not for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee (and me).

Anthony Seaton is a retired chest physician and professor of environmental medicine