THE bulk cargo vessel St Dimitrios has delivered 62,000 tonnes of wood pellets to the Port of Tyne which are to go to the Drax Power Station in North Yorkshire.
The vessel has sailed 8,846 nautical miles over 44 days from Vancouver in Canada and took five days to unload. Since 2010, the port has handled almost seven million tons of wood pellets.
This is not environmentally friendly, especially when it is trees that they are chopping down for fuel.
Only a few miles from the port is the site of Westoe Colliery which could have provided coal to fuel local power stations.
If the Government had not withdrawn funding for clean coal technology, the UK could have been a world leader.
Blaydon MP Dave Anderson has said: “We buy tens of millions of tons of coal from countries where child and slave labour is rife and where tens of thousands of miners are killed every year in mines that would have been a disgrace in Dickensian times.”
This policy of globalisation is led by wealthy multi-national corporations and motivated by huge profits. It has led to the wiping out of the British coalmining industry. Anything that rids countries of selfsufficiency is welcomed by those who want a world without frontiers where money and people can be moved about for maximum profit.
It is a disastrous policy.
It’s time to look after our own people and UK interests and boot out the internationalist and EU nonsense that is bad for all of us.
John Aspinall, Gateshead
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