Part of 1. 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:46 pm on 8 November 2016.
If it’s a question of sanity, then the insanity he displayed along with his party in the 1980s when our coal-mining industry was closed down is testament to that. I welcome his conversion, but one thing I have to say to him is that coal as a source of fuel is not going to return in the UK. The deep mines are gone: they’ve been built over, there are buildings and homes over them. The only option is opencasting. If he wishes to advocate that, he is welcome to join me and the residents of Kenfig Hill in my constituency who have particular views on opencasting and have to live next door to what is, at the moment, a dormant and derelict opencast site. The reality is that we have a choice as a nation: either we seek to import more energy—be that natural gas from, for example, Russia—or we seek to import even more liquid natural gas or we seek to import coal from other countries in the world. That is one choice, or we go for energy security and we develop an energy system that draws on renewable energy but is also secure for us in the future. That, I think, is the perfectly sensible option.