Down and Out with Coal

It’s not just Senator Joe Manchin (D-WVA) who doesn’t want to let go of coal. It’s China, India, and the representatives at COP26. As I said in “The Failure at COP26,” coal is the dirtiest and most destructive emitter of greenhouse gases. Yet, at the conclusion of COP26, the environmental diplomats in charge of saving our planet from a coming environmental disaster downgraded their statement from “phase-out coal” to “phase-down coal.”

Climate scientists are clear that continued coal emissions will ensure that our climate’s temperature goes over the 1.5°C “tipping point” by mid-century. This will result in the more severe environmental disasters that they have warned about for decades. There is an instructive backstory on the failure to “phase-out coal” which must be understood. “Phasing-down” coal is not just about the fossil fuel industry and nations like China and India wanting to continue burning it; it’s about the inability of nations to effectively address global warming.

At the beginning of COP26, negotiators were pushing for a faster phase-out of coal and fossil fuel subsidies. As the talks progressed, this changed to ending “unabated” coal burning and “inefficient” subsid,es. A third draft wanted to accelerate efforts toward phasing-out coal. The end result was downgrading to phase-down; a cop out. What is even more alarming is that the Paris Accords, in 2015, which identified the 1.5°C tipping point never mentioned fossil fuels, the predominant cause of climate change. COP26 six years later, was the first time a UN climate summit named fossil fuels as the primary cause of climate change.