Abated Pledges

Astonishingly enough, it appears that the greenest government ever is preparing to consign yet another pledge to the memory hole, where it can join the one about ending the deficit by 2015 and the perennial favourite about the NHS being safe in those sweaty little hands. All agog at the run-up to the recent Paris blah-blah on climate change, the token filly for green crap proclaimed that the Government would "set out proposals to close coal by 2025". Amber Rudd, the token filly in question, has form when it comes to making pledges with a whiff of Clegg about them: it was she who promised that frackers would not be allowed to operate under sites of special scientific interest, whereupon the greenest government ever decided to allow frackers to operate under sites of special scientific interest.

In this case, the proposals have been delayed by the coal industry, which has been squealing that it is in far too much of a crisis to do anything at all just now and, no doubt, threatening to turn all the lights off just in time for the next elections. Andrea Leadsom, a Rudd underfilly and therefore about as token as it's possible to be without actually being Sajid Javid, has "encouraged" the coal companies to give Rudd a bit of help in deciding what she meant by the pledge. Meanwhile, a four-year competition to develop carbon capture and storage technology has been scrapped six months before the prize was due, and plans have been drawn up to crate a massive open-cast coal mine somewhere in the Northern Powerhouse. A spokesbeing for Rudd's department was rapidly extruded to proclaim that the Government is "absolutely committed to phasing out power production from unabated coal by 2025 and it is nonsense to suggest otherwise", so presumably the planned mine will be producing the abated stuff only, once the coal industry has inserted its preferred meaning of the term into Amber Rudd.