In stark opposition to Sami Grover @ TreeHugger, NewScientist‘s Michael LePage asserts (18 July 2015) that coal burning will remain ascendant, and even rise – precisely because of the previously celebrated success:
Coal is the key to all our futures. Rich countries have made some progress in cutting carbon dioxide emissions, largely by shifting away from coal to less-polluting fuels. But the result has been a glut of cheap coal, leading to a coal renaissance that could consign us to a world more than 4 °C warmer.
And the nation hosting the December 2015 UN summit on climate change, also in Paris, is helping fund this renaissance. It’s hardly surprising then that no one at last week’s conference thought the summit would deliver a deal to stop global temperatures rising more than 2 °C – generally considered to be the threshold above which catastrophic consequences are inevitable.
British Petroleum has a nifty interactive chart on coal prices, confirming this assertion. Back to LePage, the conference is not enthused by recent actions:
Some have claimed the opposite recently, heralding a report by the International Energy Agency finding that global energy-related emissions had not risen for the first time in 2014, even as the economy grew.
But Edenhofer thinks the 2014 figures could well be revised upwards. And even if they’re right, it was probably a blip rather than a turning point, he told New Scientist: “One year is not a good indicator.”
Which seems a bit pessimistic, but given the gravity of the subject, it may not be unwarranted.
Along with cheaper prices comes the concerns about jobs:
[France] will now continue to subsidise the building of coal-fired power stations in other countries, to save jobs at the French companies that construct them.
This strikes me as the key to the problem, as burning coal, while well-understood, is not a trivial undertaking – without the capability, the value of coal plunges to near-nil. And you can’t help but wonder if the French understand that this is penny-wise, pound-foolish. Perhaps they should offer to help build nuclear plants, instead.
A Plan B was mooted about, however:
… some called for Plan B: a global pricing system for carbon that is high enough to kill coal once and for all.
“Without carbon pricing, I have serious doubts that we can deal with the renaissance of coal,” economist Ottmar Edenhofer of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany told the conference.
Kristin Eberhard has a wonderful post on Sightline Institute covering the various carbon pricing systems in use throughout the world, which should cover coal amongst other sources of carbon.
Oregon and Washington leaders are contemplating turbocharging their clean energy transition by instituting carbon pricing here in the Pacific Northwest. Will a cap or tax on carbon work? Has anyone else ever done this before? Why, yes. Since you ask: Scandinavian countries have been pricing carbon for more than two decades. The European Union Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) has been pricing carbon for almost a decade. US states and Canadian provinces have been pricing for years. Today, there are 39 (1) different programs that collectively put a price on 12 percent of all the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the world. And when China’s national program starts in 2016, almost a quarter of global GHG pollution will carry a price tag to speed the changeover to clean energy.
If you take the folks at the Paris Conference at their word, however, in thinking a global pricing system is necessary, well, it seems doomed to failure, simply due to the intransigence of the current US Congressional delegation. Without Federal legislation, there is little to keep the US from selling coal at a substantial discount to those nations building and using coal burning plants – perhaps State legislation could be applied, but I’m no international law expert.
What has struck me in my casual reading, though, is a lack of sympathy for the viewpoint of those who would be negatively affected, short-term, by various proposals to cut back on coal-burning. I wonder if it’s reasonable, if the possibility has been explored, to buy out the stakeholders of the various coal-burning power plants, and of the mines and/or mining companies responsible for producing coal, and possibly even those who are responsible for transit – the point being this: Sun Tzu, in THE ART OF WAR, suggests that if you trap an enemy so that there is no way out, they will fight frantically, as they see their very lives at stake. That might be seen as those with their livelihoods tied to coal. But, Sun Tzu goes on, if you give them a way out of the trap, then they will take that way out – and, for him, since an enemy on the run was easier to destroy than one standing and fighting, that’s when you struck. For our analogy, when the stakeholders are compensated, then you can destroy the coal-burning plants – and make coal less desirable.
Are there problems? Sure. It’ll be expensive, there’ll be fraud, there will be the short-sighted and the ideologically blindered and the religiously certain that it’s Not Their Fault. And that’s important – people hate to be told they’re doing wrong, that they’re destroying the world; it’s worthwhile to emphasize that was never the goal. It wasn’t even predictable until relatively recent.
But it’s worth doing.
