Climate activists and local campaigners to blockade mine in protest at expansion plan

Climate activists are preparing to shut down a coal mine for three days in protest at expansion plans.

Extinction Rebellion (XR) is joining forces with local campaigners to blockade the open-cast coal mine in County Durham on Wedesday.

The climate protesters, who are prepared to be arrested, say expanding mining flies in the face of the need to urgently stop burning fossil fuels that accelerate the climate emergency.

Local residents, meanwhile, warn the plan would devastate an area that is home to red kites, badgers, bats, great crested newts, common blue butterfly, barn owls and a range of plants and fungi.

The blockade launches 40 days of planned action, starting symbolically on Ash Wednesday, by XR campaigners demanding urgent action to halt biodiversity loss and reduce the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions to net zero within five years. The XR group members are planning “non-violent civil disobedience”.

A row over mining in the Pont Valley in Durham flared up in 2015, when permission was granted for a new 550,000-tonne coal mine. The Banks Group, which operates two coal mines in Northumberland, said earlier this year it would push ahead with the project.

More than 300 protesters are due to join the blockade, called We are the Dead Canaries, in the culmination of a four-week campaign against the proposed expansion of the Bradley mine.

They want Durham County Council and the government to reject the idea, pointing out that both the council and Parliament have declared climate emergencies.

In 2018, the UK decided to phase out coal from 2025.

Planning permission for the mine was refused by Durham County Council three times, in response to a massive public outcry, with more than 5,500 objections, but the mining company won on appeal.

An XR spokeswoman told The Independent: “We want to draw attention to the absolute hypocrisy of expanding mining. It’s not just a local issue: the government is doing nothing to intervene.”

Kevin Haigh, 73, whose grandfather and father were local miners, said: “Banks’ Group say it’s better to mine here than import our coal. To that scientifically dubious claim, I say ‘Would you like to die from Russian coal or UK coal?’ We don’t want to die from any coal pollution!

A vicar will hold an Ash Wednesday service during the protest.

The Banks Group accused XR of being “privileged and ill informed” and of making the climate crisis worse.

Spokesman Mark Dowdall ​said: “XR’s ill conceived demands will directly exacerbate the problem they are looking to solve. Until viable alternatives are in place, five to six million tonnes of coal will still be needed each year in the UK as a raw material for our steel and cement industries so that we can build much-needed infrastructure including new wind and solar farms, houses, roads and railways.

“Where is the environmental sense in hauling 90 per cent of this coal over thousands of miles from places like Russia, which scandalously already supplies almost 50 percent of the coal used in the UK, when we can mine and deliver it to British cement and steelworks for significantly lower greenhouse gas emissions and sustain much-needed northern jobs and investment?

“The consequence of XR’s demands would be to increase the amount of coal that British industry is forced to import, which already adds the equivalent emissions of 200 jumbo jets constantly circling the Earth to the UK’s global greenhouse gas emissions.

“The privileged, ill-informed XR protesters, most of whom are from outside the area and who are causing more disturbance to local residents than our operations ever have, would be more effective protesting against imports of Russian, American and Australian coal.”