It's not often that politicians put aside their differences to work together. But last weekend, with little fanfare, David Cameron, Nick Clegg, and Ed Miliband signed up to a new pact – an agreement to work together to tackle climate change.
Seeing the leaders of three different political parties singing from the same song sheet is highly unusual in the run up to a general election -- a time when it's more common for them to be carving out their differences. But it's not just the novelty of this announcement that makes it something to take notice of. The pact they put their names to means that the UK is now the world's first major economy to have a written promise to end unabated coal burning for power generation -- an action that could spread far beyond the paper that the leaders signed last Saturday.
It beggars belief that now, in the 21st century when there are so many clean, renewable options out there, we're still powering the country on dirty coal. This Victorian Age fuel produces gargantuan quantities of CO2, meaning it has been famously described as the "single greatest threat to our planet."
The pact was signed by Cameron, Clegg and Miliband. Credit: Green Alliance
As well as cooking the climate, our coal addiction continues to cause needless loss of life. It's estimated that coal mining causes 12,000 fatalities each year. And year on year across Europe, toxic chemicals released by coal power stations are thought to cause more than 22,000 premature deaths. An estimated 1,600 of these are in the UK.
So why is that with all of this considered and 130 years since we first started burning it to produce power, we just can't seem to kick our coal habit?
Firstly, coal is cheap to extract. The low cost of mining it mean that, even when the true cost is much higher when the climate and health impacts are factored in, many countries still turn to coal to meet rising electricity demand.
There's also an abundance of it. Some countries have such huge reserves that if it was all dug up and burned we'd have no hope of avoiding dangerous climate change.
It's these factors that mean there's an urgent need for the world to pledge to stop burning coal. That's why it's particularly important that countries like the UK, where we have huge renewable energy potential yet we continue to run some of Europe's most-polluting coal plants, begin to take a tougher stance.
Like the recent news that the US and China will work closely to lower their greenhouse gases, the pact could have a knock-on effect. It could help create the political space for more countries, particularly other European ones, to follow in laying out their intentions to slash their emissions too. Similar acts could in turn lead to a renewed sense of optimism in the run up to global climate talks taking place in Paris this December.
Alongside the political impact, the pact also sends a message to UK energy companies -- that the future isn't coal, and that they should think twice before refurbishing their old coal plants to keep them open.
For many of us this news has been a long time in the making. Eight years ago, thousands of us campaigned to prevent E.ON from expanding its coal power station at Kingsnorth in Kent -- the first of what could have been a new wave of coal power across the country.
After repeated protests at the proposed site, and after a high profile court case where six Greenpeace activists successfully argued that they were justified in trying to shut the power station down, E.ON rolled back its construction plans. The decision to drop the Kingsnorth expansion, and subsquent government back track on plans to build other coal plants, was a substantial step toward avoiding a CO2 catastrophe. Yet it's only now, after years of further public pressure, that the UK has gone further, committing to actively start shutting down old, highly-polluting coal plants.
So it's taken the best part of a decade to get to where we are now -- and it's clear that the emails you sent, the letters you wrote, the petitions you signed, and the pressure you've piled on politicians has paid off. The next step will be to make sure that whoever is in power after the election knows that they must make good on their promise.
But before that, we’re a step closer to the time when the world is free from climate-wrecking coal. And when it comes to protecting the climate, that time can't come soon enough.
