Scat, King Coal!

From CNBC:

The Trump administration is repealing the Clean Power Plan and proposing to extend the life of the defunct U.S. coal industry by providing it with taxpayer-funded subsidies. The proposal is the equivalent of having offered subsidies to hay producers in order to keep buggies on the streets in 1910, when automobiles had already shown their superiority.

Original DVD cover

The historic coal industrial complex that includes both coal mining and coal-fired electric plants has been permanently and irrevocably replaced.

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First and perhaps of foremost importance is the fact that coal is the dirtiest of all energy sources. The public health consequences of coal mining and burning include black lung disease caused by coal dust, and chronic bronchitis, asthma and congestive heart failure caused by air-polluting particulates, leading to reductions in life expectancy and premature deaths. These health effects are suffered both by coal miners, as well as by those who live near coal burning plants. Dense air pollution is the main reason why China and India are shutting down coal plants in the proximity of major cities.

Second, there is growing concern over the impacts on fresh water. Mountain top removal for coal mining frequently buries streams, contaminates local water sources, and increases the risk of flooding. [In addition,] Highly water-intensive, a typical coal plant uses up to four billion gallons of water a year.

Third, as a result of the above two effects, public tolerance of coal plants that pollute the air and mines that contaminate the surrounding water is quickly dwindling.

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Fourth, coal is an obsolete technology that creates no new jobs. In fact the industry has been contracting employment over the past 10 to 15 years worldwide as mining becomes every day more automated. In the U.S. the coal industry has shrunk from 130,000 to around 50,000 today, fewer than are currently employed by Arby’s. Meanwhile the International Energy Agency said that the solar PV industry creates more than twice the number of jobs per unit of electricity generation compared with coal or natural gas. With the right support, coal miners can retrain and become key to the new energy generation industry.

Fifth, renewable energy is increasingly competitive and rapidly rising to utility scale, making finance institutions no longer willing to incur the risk of exposure to assets, which are no longer competitive and quickly losing their value in rapidly changing energy markets.

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Sixth, the myth that coal is the only avenue to poverty reduction has been definitively punctured. There are 1.2 billion people worldwide who still in 2017 have no electricity, a major driver of growth and wellbeing. If coal could have provided electricity to them, it probably would have done so over the past one hundred years, but the high cost of extending the grid has prevented this.

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Finally, responsible corporations are increasingly demanding clean energy as the basis of their operation. There are already more than 100 large corporations that are committed to using 100% renewable energy, either buying it under direct contract to the generator, or in some cases even investing in their own clean generation capacity, even though they are not energy companies.

Any one of the above reasons would individually suffice to bid farewell to the technology in a world with viable alternatives, but the weight of the full package leaves no doubt as to the demise of coal. And this analysis has not even considered the global CO2 pollution produced by the burning of coal.

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Commentary by Christiana Figueres, former UN climate chief who oversaw the signing of the Paris Agreement on climate change in late 2015. She is currently the vice chair of the Global Covenant of Mayors and convener of Mission 2020, a group aiming to bring new urgency to the global climate conversation.