So, as the Ratcliffe-on-Soar power plant closes, today is the first day that the UK has no functioning coal-fired power stations since the first opened in 1882. We are the first major economy to give up coal, the most carbon-intensive fuel there is, but celebrations have been muted. Listening to the commentary on the radio and in the press this morning, there has been a big focus on jobs, but no mention of the terrible flooding which hit Central Europe in the last month – or indeed the more localised flooding in the East Midlands here in the UK. The impacts of climate change are almost literally lapping around our ankles and it is well past time to act.

Change is hard and there are always winners and losers, in the short term at least. As Fiona Harvey pointed out on the pod last week, high carbon jobs tend to be much more heavily unionised than clean power, so there will be significant political pressure to slow the transition. Margaret Thatcher is widely lambasted for closing many of Britain’s coal mines without providing mining communities with an alternative economic future, but she certainly wasn’t the first to do so. In probably the most brutal example, in 1951 Durham County Council gave all its settlements a designation from A to D; a full third of the villages were put in the D category meaning they would effectively be abandoned as the coal industry in the County faded – some were later reprieved, but many have simply been wiped off the map. Those which remain are some of the most impoverished parts of the country.

But as I mention above, we must not be distracted from the much, much higher costs of ‘do nothing’. Flooding, heat waves, rising sea levels and the spread of tropical diseases will cost far more lives, jobs and communities than the running down of one industrial sector. So, yes, the ambition of a ‘just transition’ to a low carbon economy must be our goal, but it must not be used as an excuse to keep us on a disastrous high carbon trajectory. Future generations will not thank us for that.