In Douglas Stuart’s Booker Prize-winning novel Shuggie Bain, the main character relocates in the early 1980s to a bleak former mining community on the outskirts of Glasgow. Stuart’s description of the local miners’ “pink hands that looked free of work” recalls the real-life fate of many British workers when big industries shrank or disappeared completely. The UK government’s official climate advisers on Wednesday urged politicians to heed the lessons from the closures of coal mines and steelworks, as the country tries to reduce its dependence on oil and gas.