War On Coal Can't Be Stopped

How's the ground breaking, world leading Paris agreement going? Answer: not so well if you look at coal. If you only focused on the United States, you might think coal's days were numbered. But that's not true globally. Far from it. Coal consumption has actually been accelerating worldwide since the end of the 1990s. More than 2,400 new coal-fired power stations are under construction or being planned around the world. The new plants will emit 6.5 billion toms of carbon dioxide a year and undermine efforts at the Paris climate conference to limit global warming to 2 C.

Let's look at some contributors: China, India, Japan and Germany. Coal is still king in China despite projections that claim its growth in capacity is no longer needed and despite the government's ratification of the Paris accord on climate change where it pledged to bring green house gas emissions to a peak no later than 2020. China's coal use, as best anyone can guess, is around 3.7 billion tons each year. Despite China's ratification of the Paris accord, it is still building more coal-fired plants. (1) China has been adding a new coal-fired plant nearly every week. It is building 368 coal-fired plants and planning a further 803. (2) Prakash Javadekar, India's environment minister, took a bold stand on the carbon emissions issues and stated a stark and inevitable truth. Though he emphasized the fact that India is committed to reduce carbon emissions, he said they may increase in the process of development and poverty eradication. He stressed the fact that India, as a developing nation, needs to grow and prosper and in the process there is no denying the fact that carbon emissions will substantially increase. (3) And increase they will: India will become the world's number 2 miner of coal by 2020, overtaking the US. There are plans to ramp up from mining 634 million tons to 1.5 billion tons by 2020. (4)

---

The nuclear disaster at Fukushima has prompted Japan to turn back to coal, with 40 plants in the pipeline and 5 under construction. Japanese utilities are resisting renewables because of concerns about the costs of renewable energy when fossil fuel imports are cheap, as well as renewable projects' safety and environmental impact. Inexpensive coal and natural gas, which is mostly imported, comprised over 75 percent of Japan's energy needs by March 2015, compared with 54 percent in 2010 before then nuclear accident at Fukushima. Japan plans to increase the number of coal burning power plants by almost 50 percent in the next 12 years. (5) In Germany, after the Fukushima incident in Japan, German Chancellor Angela Merkel shuttered eight nuclear reactors and ordered the phase-out of Germany's remaining nuclear rectors by 2022. To replace these energy providers Germany will build 10 new power plants for hard coal. (6) All of this underscores the foolishness of the Obama climate-change regulations designed to drastically reduce coal consumption in the US. References

1. Institute for Energy Research, “China and Japan, two Asian economic powerhouses, are still building coal plants,” Canada Free Press, September 21, 2016
2. “The truth about China: 2,500 new coal plants will thwart any Paris pledges,” atlasmonitor.wordpress.com, December 3, 2015
3. Ritu Singh, “India has right to grow, carbon emissions may rise: Prakash Javakedar,” zeenews.india.com, June 18, 2014
4. Joanne Nova, “India to more than double coal mining by 2020,” joannenova,com, October 17, 2016
5. Mayumi Negishi, “Japan's shift to renewable energy loses power,” The Wall Street Journal, September 14, 2016
6. Ezra Levant, “Germany out in the coal,” torontosun,com, January 6, 2014