Several nations plan
to build new coal power plants, with China alone approving nearly 100
gigawatts. Each gigawatt is the equivalent of installing more than 3
million solar panels.
![](images/images_04_11_2023/coal_ryan-pyle-corbis-getty-2048x1342A.jpg)
Earth is on track to significantly overshoot a
critical global climate target, largely because not enough coal-fired
power plants are being retired, researchers warned in two new reports.
Some nations are even planning new coal projects despite promising two
years ago to begin reducing their use of the world’s dirtiest fossil
fuel.
In 2021, nearly 200 nations agreed for the first time to phase down
“unabated” coal-fired power plants as part of the Paris Agreement,
which aims to limit average global warming to no more than 2 degrees
Celsius above pre-industrial levels, with a more ambitious goal of
staying below 1.5 degrees.
But a new peer-reviewed study, published by two Swedish universities
in the journal Environmental Research Letters, found that current
commitments by nations to wind down the use of coal-fired power aren’t
enough to meet either of the Paris Agreement’s key targets. It says
that the planet will likely warm upwards of 3 degrees Celsius by the
end of the century unless far more plants shut down over the next five
years.
In fact, the world’s fleet of coal plants actually grew last year,
according to a second report released Wednesday by Global Energy
Monitor, which tracks energy projects around the world. That report
found that coal capacity grew by 19.5 gigawatts in 2022—enough to
power roughly 15 million homes—mostly because of new plants built by
China and India. While the United States retired a record 13.5
gigawatts of coal power last year, China added 26.8 gigawatts and
India added 3.5 gigawatts, with both countries planning to build more
new plants this year.
China alone has approved nearly 100 gigawatts of additional coal power
plants, an astonishing number in light of the most recent climate
report by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change, which warned that the next seven years may be humanity’s last
chance to rapidly wind down fossil fuel use in order to stave off
runaway global warming. Each gigawatt is the equivalent of installing
more than 3 million solar panels or over 330 utility-scale wind
turbines, says the U.S. Department of Energy.
Based on those findings, the Global Energy
Monitor report’s authors said, the world would need to close coal
plants nearly five times faster than is currently happening to have
any chance of achieving the Paris Agreement target of 1.5 degrees.
“The more new coal projects come online, the steeper the cuts and
commitments need to be in the future,” Flora Champenois, lead author
of the Global Energy Monitor analysis, said in the report. “At this
rate, the transition away from existing and new coal isn’t happening
fast enough to avoid climate chaos.”
Zeke Hausfather, a researcher at the nonprofit Berkeley Earth and a
leading expert on climate modeling, wasn’t surprised by the recent
study that projects the planet warming by nearly 3 degrees.
Hausfather co-authored a scientific commentary on a study published
last year in Nature that evaluated the net-zero pledges made by 154
nations and came to a similar conclusion: The planet could warm
between 2 and 3 degrees Celsius by 2100 based on how governments
execute those plans. The best case scenario projected by that study
foresees Earth warming just under 2 degrees Celsius by 2100. Its
worst-case scenario, in which governments mostly fail to achieve their
climate commitments, shows the planet warming well above 3 degrees.
“I think it is safe to say that global temperatures are heading to
around 3°C by the end of the century under policies in place today,”
he told me in an email. “We will need to do a lot more to put us on
track to meet our climate goals.”
Scientists say each tenth of a degree the planet warms means more
deadly and destructive consequences that could quickly spiral out of
control. The world has already warmed more than 1.1 degrees Celsius
since the Industrial Revolution. Experts say that staying below the
thresholds agreed upon under the Paris climate accord could be
humanity’s best chances to avoid some of the worst threats posed by
rising temperatures, including accelerating mass extinctions,
increasingly destructive extreme weather and more frequent and
widespread famines.
It’s difficult to say with absolute certainty how the planet’s
ecosystems and weather patterns will react to the warming
temperatures, but scientists have done their best to make
well-informed calculations. For instance, researchers predict that
surpassing 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming could mean that about 14
percent of Earth’s population will be exposed to severe heat waves at
least once every five years, while at 2 degrees warming that number
jumps to 37 percent. Breaching 2 degrees could also mean that the kind
of extreme heat wave that killed at least 90 people last year in
Pakistan could become an annual event.
Varying forecasts also project tens of millions to hundreds of
millions more people experiencing increasing scarcity of water and
food due to expanding drought conditions. In perhaps one of the
scariest predictions, some research suggests that if the Earth crosses
3 degrees of warming, around 12 percent of the current population
living on land could be threatened by rising sea levels as glaciers
melt around the world. “That amounts to 810 million people,” one
scientist told Buzzfeed News.
Still, how exactly the climate crisis pans out in the coming decades
depends largely on what humans decide to do. Scientists generally
agree that the greatest obstacle to addressing the climate crisis is
political, not technical. The solutions to tackle these problems
already exist and can be implemented quickly if only governments and
big corporations prioritized them, researchers say.
That’s what climate scientist Michael Mann wants
people to take away from the recent study out of Sweden, saying its
projections for 3 degrees of warming seem “reputable enough,” but that
he remains skeptical of any analyses that premise their forecasts on
past actions.
“History is replete with examples—the Apollo mission, WWII
mobilization, etc.—where the history of the world was fundamentally
altered by a breakthrough commitment to mobilize around a specific
threat or challenge. There’s no reason to think that isn’t possible
here,” Mann wrote to me in an email. “The laws of physics are
immutable. The laws of politics are not.”
More Top Climate News
Biden Administration Unveils $450 Million to Build Renewables on Coal
Mines: There’s a silver lining in all the news about coal. The United
States is leading the way on retiring coal power plants. And the Biden
administration announced this week that $450 million in new federal
infrastructure funding will go toward developers that build renewables
on current or old coal mining sites, Zack Budryk reports for The Hill.
That announcement, along with new federal guidance unveiled this week,
could help revitalize ailing coal communities and pull them into the
clean energy transition.
Native Activist, Winona LaDuke, Resigns From Environmental Group:
Winona LaDuke, a Native American activist best known for leading
opposition to Minnesota’s Line 3 oil pipeline, has resigned as
executive director of the environmental group Honor the Earth after
the organization lost a sexual harassment lawsuit filed by a former
employee, the Associated Press reports. “I take personal
responsibility for the mistakes made,” LaDuke wrote in her resignation
post. The former employee said LaDuke didn’t sufficiently address her
allegations of sexual harassment by a coworker years ago.
New York Governor Walks Back Push to ‘Weaken’ Climate Law After
Uproar: Earlier this week, I reported that New York Gov. Kathy Hochul
was facing major backlash for supporting a plan to change how the
state measured its emissions of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas
that scientists say should become a priority in climate policy. On
Wednesday, Hochul announced she was backing off from that plan in her
budget, Grace Ashford and Dana Rubinstein report for the New York
Times. The measure, however, could still advance this year under
proposed legislation.
50%
That’s how much more carbon dioxide is in the atmosphere now compared
to pre-industrial levels, according to new data from the federal
government, which noted that CO2 levels rose by more than two parts
per million for the 11th consecutive year in 2022.
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