Will Britain ever reopen its coalmines?
No.No because the closed coal mines are back filled then capped to prevent people wandering into them.The machinery to mine the coal is sold off or scrapped.Additionally when coal mines or any other industry (notably nuclear as seen today) closes the knowledge tends to vanish as the coal miners retire or go overseas where the work happens to be.The secondary knowledge to build and maintain the machinery needed to extract the coal ventilate mines etc also vanishes too. Of course there is a lot of documented knowledge stored in books and other media but the first hand knowledge is lost forever…Unless of course people who do know and specialists are bought in from somewhere which still has such an industry (China maybe? India? Australia and USA?).All of the above means that reopening the coal mines is a considerably complex and phenomenally expensive task.We saw this in nuclear too. By 2017 all the British Nuclear Engineers had retired as a UK nuclear plant hadn’t been built since 1996 and the current engineers only knew how to maintain and run a nuclear power plant.The US saw this with NASA. Even though they had the Saturn 5 blue prints all the supporting industries needed to build it as well as the undocumented trial and error adjustments meant that NASA couldn’t build the Saturn 5 rocket any more. Some students however did build a simplified version of the rocket with only 55 parts (the original needed about 200).
Why doesn't America invest in Africa like China?
Why is the US not investing in Africa (unlike China)?I can’t say much about the USA’s investments in Africa — but I can tell you why China is pouring in so much money and manpower into the continent.China’s investments in Africa is just a new form of colonialism. Why are they spending so much money upgrading roads an infrastructure? So they have easier access to the natural resources that they so eagerly wish to acquire!They’re also propping up many regimes who have long histories of human rights abuses. Hu Jintao said one time (and I’m paraphrasing) “We’re not concerned about politics, we’re concerned about business.” Many Western countries just simply won’t deal with some oppressive regimes in Africa — but China will. When the West wishes to isolate and punish a regime, a country like China can just roll in with a sweet deal.The leaders of these countries get guns and money — which they need to stay in power. The people can be sold the promises of better schools, roads, and more job opportunities.In the short-term, these countries get a boost in infrastructure, low interest loans, and some new technology. In the long term, however, they’re being robbed. Their natural resources are being plundered, sent to China, and then RESOLD to them in the form of finished goods. China gets unfettered access to precious resources and then gets to resell all of their goods back to that country, without much competition.The jobs building the said infrastructure don’t even go to local people. China has more than enough labor to import its own army of engineers, famers, and laborers. These deals basically help China and its state owned enterprises while also helping those African regimes stay afloat. The people themselves are getting cheated, and those countries’ long term futures are being mortgaged to the Chinese for a short boon to that country’s ruling elite.Are Western nations innocent, little angels? No. They previously colonized and plundered Africa, too. Most of Western Europe was in on the raid during the age of rapid industrialization and globalization dating back to the 15th century.I’ve been to the slave castles in Ghana — where people were kidnapped, sold into slavery, and then sent to the Western Hemisphere to work under horrid conditions.The West is definitely responsible for ravaging Africa — but now its China that’s doing the ravaging — although under a much more clever, politically correct guise.