Imagine a conversation somewhere east of the Vistula ...
Sergey
Some good energy news for a change Mr President. Useful idiots in England have pressurised an out of their depth local council to change its tune about opening a new mine for coking coal. This means we can keep exporting the stuff to them.
Vladimir
Excellent. Tell me, we don’t actually pay these fools do we?
Sergey
Not at all, Vladimir Vladimirovich. There’s no need; they’re happy to help us export our coal to them because they’re afraid of the bad publicity that opening a coal mine would mean when they are hosting COP26.
Vladimir
So we keep the jobs in Mother Russia, then, and maintain our export market?
Sergey
Indeed, even though the carbon footprint of our coal is higher than theirs would have been because of the transport costs. And they might have developed an export market themselves.
Vladimir
Tell, me Sergey Viktorovich, how do we make sure that the UK always hosts these COP meetings?
………………………………………………………..
This same conversation (albeit this time between Antony and Joe) also took place east of the Potomac around the same time. For details of who'll continue to export coking coal to the UK see Stastica.
Responses
Mmm. Although it’s only 30 miles up the coast we can see both sides of this controversy.
Sadly one of our particular valuable key industry ,
GLAXO pharmaceuticals is up for closure. It was down graded from being the core of GLAXO R&D a few years ago and now its remaining manufacturing unit is being sold. International financial aspects seem to be the motivation. Ironic that its recently installed CEO is a local girl.