World Must Triple Efforts Or Face Catastrophic Climate Change, Says UN

The Guardian - Fiona Harvey

Rapid emissions turnaround needed to keep global warming at less than 2C, report suggests

The drought-stricken La Sorrueda reservoir in Gran Canaria, Spain. Rising emissions could trigger extreme weather events around the world, the UN says. Photograph: Reuters

Countries are failing to take the action needed to stave off the worst effects of climate change, a UN report has found, and the commitments made in the 2015 Paris agreement will not be met unless governments introduce additional measures as a matter of urgency.
New taxes on fossil fuels, investment in clean technology and much stronger government policies to bring down emissions are likely to be necessary. Governments must also stop subsidising fossil fuels, directly and indirectly, the UN said.
Gunnar Luderer, one of the authors of the UN report and senior scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, said: “There is still a tremendous gap between words and deeds, between the targets agreed by governments and the measures to achieve these goals.
“Only a rapid turnaround here can help. Emissions must be reduced by a quarter by 2030 [to keep warming to no more than 2C (3.6F) above pre-industrial levels] and for 1.5C emissions would have to be halved.”
In all, a tripling of effort may be needed to keep warming to less than 2C, meeting scientific advice on avoiding the most dangerous effects of climate change.

Greenhouse gas emissions continued their long-term rise last year, according to the UN, but they could be brought under control. There are promising signs, such as investment from the private sector in renewable energy and other technologies to cut carbon, but these are currently insufficient to meet scientific advice.
Joyce Msuya, deputy executive director of UN Environment, said: “The science is clear: for all the ambitious climate action we’ve seen, governments need to move faster and with greater urgency. We’re feeding this fire, while the means to extinguish it are within reach.”
Global emissions have reached what the UN has called “historic levels” of 53.5 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, and are showing no signs of peaking, despite a levelling off in the past decade.
The report came a day after Donald Trump said he did not believe his own administration’s latest report warning about the dire risk of inaction on climate change.
Last month, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned of the dire effects of allowing global warming to reach 1.5C above pre-industrial levels. The world has a little over a decade to bring down greenhouse gas emissions before such dangerous levels of warming become inevitable.
Only 57 countries, representing 60% of global greenhouse gas emissions, are on track to cause their emissions to peak before 2030. If emissions are allowed to rise beyond that, the IPCC has said countries are likely to breach the 1.5C limit, which will trigger sea-level rises, droughts, floods and other extreme weather events.
On Monday, the biggest review of climate change in the UK for a decade found that flooding was likely to become more severe and summers could become more than 5C hotter within 50 years.
The UN’s warning comes before key talks in Poland next month, when governments will meet to discuss how to implement the commitments made in Paris in 2015. According to the Paris agreement, the first global pact to bind both developed and developing countries to a specific temperature goal, governments must do all they can to stop warming reaching 2C above pre-industrial levels, with an aspiration to limit warming to no more than 1.5C.
Jian Liu, the chief scientist at UN Environment, said some of the necessary policies were clear and available, if there was political will to implement them. “When governments embrace fiscal policy measures to subsidise low-carbon alternatives and tax fossil fuels, they can stimulate the right investments in the energy sector and significantly reduce carbon emissions. If all fossil fuel subsidies were phased out, global carbon emissions could be reduced by up to 10% by 2030.”
Carbon pricing is one way of achieving this, but has run into difficulties as taxes are often unpopular and schemes to reduce carbon through emissions trading are often contested by businesses and other interests.
Greenhouse gas emissions stalled soon after the global financial crisis of a decade ago, then quickly resumed their rise, to the consternation of climate experts. For three years before 2017 they fell once again, but last year there was an increase. Emissions are expected to rise further this year, pointing to an emissions gap between what countries promised in Paris and what their policies are delivering.
Another problem is that infrastructure such as buildings, transport networks and energy generation that is built now to rely on fossil fuels will in effect lock in future emissions for the lifetime in which that infrastructure operates, usually up to 50 years.
Changing the way we construct infrastructure is therefore essential, but many companies and governments still rely on old measures of economic performance and old ways of generating energy and constructing buildings.
Jennifer Morgan, the executive director of Greenpeace International, said: “The window of opportunity is starting to close and if we fail to act now the opportunity will be gone. Failure to act will lock in catastrophic global warming that will change the planet irrevocably and condemn millions to suffering. What are governments waiting for?”
Stephanie Pfeifer, the chief executive of the Institutional Investors Group on Climate Change, said some businesses were taking action. “Investors understand the opportunity presented by the move to a low-carbon economy. The right signals from government will help to unlock low-carbon investment from the private sector.”

Links

• Emissions Gap Report 2018
• Emissions Gap Report 2017
• The Emissions Gap Report 2016
• Emissions Gap Report 2015
• The Emissions Gap Report 2014
• The Emissions Gap Report 2013
• The Emissions Gap Report 2012
• Paris Agreement
• Australia not on track to hit Paris emissions goals, as UN warns global efforts must increase
• Climate-heating greenhouse gases at record levels, says UN

Climate Change Already A Health Emergency, Say Experts

The Guardian - Damian Carrington

Deadly heatwaves and spread of diseases affect people’s health today – report

Farmers on the outskirts of Guwahati, India. The country lost the equivalent of 7% of its total working hours due to extreme heat in 2017. Photograph: EPA 

People’s health is being damaged today by climate change through effects ranging from deadly heatwaves in Europe to rising dengue fever in the tropics, according to a report.
Billions of hours of farmwork has been lost during high temperatures and global warming has damaged the ability to grow crops, it said.
The Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change was produced by 150 experts from 27 universities and institutions including the World Health Organization and the World Bank.
“The findings are clear and the stakes could not be higher,” said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO director-general. “We cannot delay action on climate change. We cannot sleepwalk through this health emergency any longer.”
The report sets out the impacts of global warming on health in stark terms. ”A rapidly changing climate has dire implications for every aspect of human life, exposing vulnerable populations to extremes of weather, altering patterns of infectious disease, and compromising food security, safe drinking water and clean air,” it said.
Nick Watt, the executive director of the Lancet Countdown, said: “These are not things happening in 2050 but are things we are already seeing today. We think of these as the canary in, ironically, the coalmine.”
On Tuesday the UN said action to cut carbon emissions must be tripled to avoid catastrophic warming. International climate change negotiations were due to resume on Monday in Poland.
The Lancet report said the lack of progress “threatens both human lives and the viability of the national health systems they depend on, with the potential to overwhelm health services”.
A survey in the report of leaders of almost 500 global cities found half expected their public health infrastructure to be seriously compromised by climate change, meaning systemic failures such as the shutdown of hospitals.
A heatwave in Europe this summer was linked to hundreds of premature deaths in the UK alone. MPs said in July that the UK was “woefully unprepared” for heatwaves.
The Lancet report says populations in Europe and the eastern Mediterranean are at higher risk than those in Africa and south-east Asia because of the high proportion of vulnerable and elderly people living in cities.
As temperatures rise across the world, the report says 157 million more vulnerable people were subjected to a heatwave in 2017 than in 2000. Hot conditions directly damage health via heatstroke, but dehydration and exacerbation of conditions such as heart disease are also very dangerous. Heat also worsens air pollution and mental health problems.
Prof Kristie Ebi, of the University of Washington, said: “Increased mortality in extreme heatwaves is happening now [but] there is abundant evidence that communities are not prepared for the ongoing increases in the frequency, intensity and duration of heatwaves.”
The Lancet report said 153bn hours of work were lost in 2017 due to extreme heat, 80% of it in agriculture. Almost half the losses were in India, equivalent to 7% of its total working population, while China lost the equivalent of 1.4% of its workers. “This has led to vast losses for national economies and household budgets,” said Prof Joacim Rocklöv of Umeå University in Sweden.
Relatively small changes in temperatures and rainfall could cause large changes in the transmission of infectious diseases spread via water and mosquitoes. The ability of the dengue fever virus to be transmitted – its “vectorial capacity” – reached a record high in 2016, according to the report, 10% above a 1950s baseline. The danger from cholera risk was also rising in regions such as the Baltic states where the sea has been warming rapidly.
Doctors not involved in the report said it presented convincing evidence. “It is clear that climate change is directly impacting our health,” said Howard Frumkin, head of the Wellcome Trust’s Our Planet, Our Health programme. “All sectors must prioritise action on climate change if we are to significantly reduce the potentially devastating impact on our planet and our health, affecting generations to come.”
Prof Paul Ekins, of University College London, said the health benefits of tackling climate change had long been undervalued, with just 5% of funding for adaptation to global warming being spent on health.
“These benefits are enormous, near-term and affect our health immediately,” Ekins said. “If you factor in these benefits, cutting emissions to [keep the temperature rise below] 1.5C is going to be a net benefit to humanity in monetary terms.”
The Lancet report noted some promising trends, such as the phase-out of coal and the growth of electric cars.
Prof Hilary Graham, of the University of York and part of the Lancet Countdown team, said linking health and climate change could help spur further action. “Health is what people feel. It makes a direct connection with their lives and the lives of people they care about like their children and grandchildren.”

Links

• Lancet Countdown's 2018 report
• World must triple efforts or face catastrophic climate change, says UN
• 467 ways to die on a warming globe
• Global food system is broken, say world’s science academies
• Our Planet, Our Health: responding to a changing world
• 2017 was the hottest year on record without El Niño boost
• Climate change 'will make rice less nutritious'
• Climate change isn’t just hurting the planet – it’s a public health emergency
• Climate change already bringing disease, air pollution and heatwaves
• World has three years left to stop dangerous climate change, warn experts
• Climate change impacts are already hitting us, say Europeans
• Shattered records show climate change is an emergency today, scientists warn
• Philippine experts divided over climate change action
• Climate change 'already affecting food supply' – UN

Five Myths About Climate Change

Washington Post - Katharine Hayhoe

Smoke rises from chimneys of the gas boiler houses as the temperature dropped to minus 14 degrees Celsius in Moscow, Russia, 29 November 2018. According to a report by the UN, CO2 emissions have gone up for the first time in four years. (Maxim Shipenkov/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock)

Katharine Hayhoe

Katharine Hayhoe is a professor and director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University. She is a lead author on volumes one and two of the Fourth National Climate Assessment.

The Fourth National Climate Assessment — the work of 13 federal agencies and more than 350 scientists, including me — is clear: The Earth is warming faster than at any time in human history, and we’re the ones causing it. Climate change is already affecting people, and the more carbon we produce, the more dangerous the effects over the coming century. Nevertheless, many people continue to believe and propagate some misleading myths. Here are the five I hear most frequently.

Myth No. 1: Climate scientists are in it for the money.
When the second volume of the National Climate Assessment was released on Nov. 23, Rick Santorum, a Republican former senator from Pennsylvania, took to CNN to proclaim that climate scientists “are driven by the money that they receive.” Former House majority leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) appeared on the network the next day declaring the report to be “made by scientists that get paid to further the politics of global warming.”
I was one of the report’s authors. How much did I earn for the hundreds of hours I spent on it? Nothing. Nearly every day, climate scientists are accused of venality. Our other purported sins include fabricating data, selling out to “big green” — which supposedly tethers our grant money to doom-and-gloom findings — and fanning the flames of hysteria to further our nefarious agenda.
The reality is that nearly every climate scientist could make at least the same amount of money — and often much more — in a different field, including the oil industry. And the money we do receive in grants doesn’t go into our pockets. A $1.1 million grant from the National Science Foundation provided me with a mere $37,000 a year, all of which went to paying for the proposed work, including a graduate researcher, a computer and publication fees. (In summer, I do some climate-focused consulting with cities and water districts to cover my salary when I’m not teaching.) Santorum, meanwhile, receives a substantial income from serving as a consultant to Consol Energy, a coal company; and according to OpenSecrets.org, DeLay has received nearly $740,000 from the oil and gas industry.

Myth No. 2: The climate has changed before. It's just a natural cycle.
Last fall, when the first volume of the National Climate Assessment was released, White House spokesman Raj Shah responded that “the climate has changed and is always changing.” President Trump himself has embraced this position, claiming that the climate “will change back again.” This line is a popular one with people who dismiss climate change by maintaining that we’ve had ice ages before, as well as warm periods, and so the warming we’re seeing now is just what the Earth has always done.
But we can look at the natural factors that affect the climate. First, over the past few decades, energy from the sun has been going down , not up, so if changes in the sun’s energy drove our temperature, we should be getting cooler, not warmer.
Others argue that we’re getting warmer because we’re recovering from the last ice age. But ice ages — and the warm periods in between — are caused by the Earth’s orbital cycles, and according to those cycles, the next event on our geologic calendar is another ice age, not more warming.
We can also rule out volcanoes, which do produce heat-trapping gases, but less than 1 percent of the CO2 that humans produce. And big eruptions, when they happen, cool the Earth instead of warming it. In other words, the climate change we’re experiencing now definitely isn’t natural.

Myth No. 3: Climate scientists are split on whether it's real.
We often hear that climate scientists are split 50-50 when it comes to whether global warming is occurring. “Each side has their scientists,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) told Politico in 2014. Trump echoed that rhetoric on “60 Minutes” this October, telling Lesley Stahl, “We have scientists that disagree” with human-caused global warming.In reality, more than 97 percent of climate scientists agree that global warming is happening and that humans are causing it. At least 18 scientific societies in the United States, from the American Geophysical Union to the American Medical Association, have issued official statements on climate change. And it’s been more than 50 years since U.S. scientists first raised the alarm about the dangers of climate change with the president — at the time, Lyndon B. Johnson. The public confusion has been manufactured by industry interests and ideologues to muddy the waters.

Myth No. 4: Climate change won't affect me.
We often think the most widespread myth is that the science isn’t real. But according to public opinion polls by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication , the most prevalent misconception — one that the majority of us have bought into — is that climate change just doesn’t matter to us. While 70 percent of American adults agree that climate change is happening, only 40 percent of those surveyed believe it will harm them personally. Sure, it’ll hurt polar bears, and maybe people who live on low-lying islands in the South Pacific. But the world has warmed by just 1 degree Celsius, or 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit, since 1900. What’s the big deal?
Climate change is a threat multiplier that touches everything, from our health to our economy to our coasts to our infrastructure. It makes heat waves stronger, heavy precipitation events more frequent and hurricanes more intense, and it nearly doubles the area burned by wildfires . It supercharges natural disasters like Hurricane Harvey and the Camp Fire, as those suffering the effects of these events know firsthand. Climate change is no longer a distant issue in space or time: It’s affecting us, today, in the places where we live.

Myth No. 5: It's cold outside — global warming can't be real.
Whenever a cold snap brings out our winter parkas, there’s a politician or pundit saying, Global warming? Global cooling, more like! Trump has done so repeatedly, tweeting just before Thanksgiving, “Brutal and Extended Cold Blast could shatter ALL RECORDS — Whatever happened to Global Warming?” In 2015, Sen. James M. Inhofe (R-Okla.) brought a snowball to the Senate floor in an attempt to reject the reality of climate change.
But cold weather doesn’t rebut the data that shows the planet is warming over climate time scales. Think of it this way: Weather is like your mood, and climate is like your personality. Weather is what occurs in a certain place at a certain time. Climate is the long-term average of weather over decades. The fact it was cold and snowy one day last week? That’s weather. Global warming or not, cold days still occur, particularly in winter. But since 2000, we’re seeing far more new hot-temperature records than cold ones. In fact, in 2017, we saw more than 10,000 cold-temperature records broken at weather stations across the United States. And more than 36,000 high-temperature records were broken the same year.

Links

• 1,656 pages too long? Climate report coauthor Katharine Hayhoe has 3 takeaways.
• Climate scientists are roasting Trump over his response to his own administration's climate-change report
• Scientist laughs at climate change skeptics
• Experts aren’t buying the White House’s spin on an authoritative climate report
• Climate change: Government report predicts 'substantial damages' on US lives

Australian Students Stage School Strikes Over Climate Change Inaction

New York Times - Livia Albeck-Ripka

Frustrated by their government’s failure to act on climate change, thousands of Australian students quit school for a day to protest instead.

Milou Albrecht, 14, center, speaking to students attending a rally for climate change action at the Old Treasury Building in Melbourne, Australia, on Friday. Credit Christina Simons for The New York Times

 MELBOURNE, Australia — As wildfires raged across the country, a heat wave again threatened the Great Barrier Reef and a mining giant announced it would push ahead with a huge coal project, thousands of students across Australia quit school for the day on Friday to protest government inaction on climate change.
The students — ranging in age from 5 to 18 — came from more than 200 schools to demand that the federal government block construction of the Adani Carmichael coal mine, block any new coal or gas projects and require 100 percent renewable energy use by 2030.
“I am here because I am terrified,” Harriet O’Shea Carre, 14, told a crowd of thousands of student marchers outside the Old Treasury Building in Melbourne. Protesters spilled out onto the road with signs saying “civil disobedience requires no permission slip” and “don’t be a fossil fool.”
Ms. O’Shea Carre, an organizer of the march and a student from Castlemaine Steiner School in Muckleford, about 70 miles northwest of Melbourne, predicted dire consequences if the government failed to act on climate change.
“I cannot bear the thought of losing the people that I love, when it could have been stopped,” she said of climate change. “And it can be stopped, but not for much longer.”
Another organizer, Milou Albrecht, said she had been inspired by the actions of Greta Thunberg, a 15-year-old girl in Sweden who since September has spent every Friday sitting in protest outside Parliament in Stockholm.
“I realized that I could do the same,” said Ms. Albrecht, 14, a schoolmate of Ms. O’Shea Carre.
Ms. Thunberg tweeted her support of the students.

 #FridaysForFuture #ClimateStrike #schoolstrike4climate #walkout

Greta Thunberg Twitter

With the help of their parents, climate activists and the Australian Youth Climate Coalition, Ms. Albrecht, Ms. O’Shea Carre and two other students from the same town, Callum Neilson-Bridgefoot, 11, and Tully Boyle, 15, created a campaign video and set up a website and Facebook groups to publicize the strike.

Student protesters in Melbourne on Friday. Organizers estimated that about 8,000 students participated in Melbourne and Sydney alone. Credit Christina Simons for The New York Times

 Ms. Albrecht said she was astonished by the number of students who took part.
In Melbourne and Sydney, organizers estimated that about 8,000 students participated, and hundreds more joined the effort in other cities and towns. And earlier this week, an estimated 1,700 students protested in other parts of the country, including more than 200 who showed up at Parliament House in Canberra, the capital, to demand answers from Prime Minister Scott Morrison.

Still waiting to go in to Parliament House...@ScottMorrisonMP @billshortenmp will you save us the wait and come #MeetTheKids? #SchoolStrike #climatestrike

School Strike 4 Climate Twitter

On Monday, Mr. Morrison told senators that he did not condone the strike, because students should focus on “more learning” and “less activism.” He said he did not support “schools being turned into parliaments.”
The resources minister, Matt Canavan, was more pointed, saying students “don’t learn anything” by marching.
“I want kids to be at school to learn about how you build a mine, how you do geology, how you drill for oil and gas,” he told the local news media.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison said this week that he did not condone the protests, and that students should be focused on “more learning” and “less activism.” Credit Christina Simons for The New York Times

While the students did not manage to meet with Mr. Morrison, they were able to discuss their climate demands with members of the Green and Labor parties.
“We have seen parties listening to us, so we do have hope,” said Maiysha Moin, 17, an organizer from Fintona Girls’ School in Melbourne. “We’re part of a democracy; you can’t just ignore us because we’re younger,” she added.
Organizers said the students were joined by teenagers in Sweden, France, Norway and Finland who also skipped school in support.
In Melbourne, the students left the Treasury building’s steps to march through the busy city center. Some passers-by looked on, bewildered, as the strikers chanted, “The youth are rising, we’re not compromising.”

Links

• Schools Climate Strike: The Best Protest Banners And Posters
• Climate change: Australian students skip school for mass protest
• Students strike for climate change protests, defying calls to stay in school
• Yes, Prime Minister, I'm Striking From School: Consider It A Climate Lesson
• Climate Change Threatens Our Children's Health As Well As Their Future
• 'We'll Be Voting Soon': Students Take On PM Over Climate Change
• Climate change strike: thousands of school students join national protest
• Hundreds of students striking over climate change descend on parliament
• Australian students plan school strikes to protest against climate inaction
• Australia relationship with Pacific on climate change 'dysfunctional' and 'abusive'
• Tony Abbott says climate change is 'probably doing good'
• Australia's chief scientist compares Trump to Stalin over climate censorship
• Climate campaigners start 'hunger strike' to block Queensland coal project

Schools Climate Strike: The Best Protest Banners And Posters

The Guardian - Guardian Staff

Children may have skipped school to campaign on climate change - but taught a lesson or two on how to write a protest banner

Students protesting inaction on climate change at Martin Place, Sydney, Australia.

Photograph: Mark Metcalfe/Getty Images

Some were witty, some were rude and some – for older people at least – were incomprehensible.
The thousands of children who left class on Friday to protest inaction on climate change brought with them a dazzling array of protest banners and posters.
Here are some of the best – from the streets and from social media.

Martin Place, Sydney.
Photograph: Mike Bowers for the Guardian 

Loving this sign at the Melbourne #ClimateStrike. 

Moira Cully Twitter

Marc Stears Twitter

 Martin Place, Sydney.
Photograph: Mike Bowers for the Guardian 

Martin Place, Sydney.
Photograph: Mike Bowers for the Guardian 

Kids message to @ScottMorrisonMP #stopadani #climatestrike.
Holly Creenaune Twitter

Hundreds of school children on the steps of SA's Parliament House protesting government 

inaction on climate change. @abcadelaide #schoolstrike4climate #adelaide #climatestrike

Malcolm Sutton Twitter

 Another one at Martin Place, Sydney, Australia. 
Photograph: Mark Metcalfe/Getty Images 

My favourite sign today from Alex & Eden: “This can’t wait till I’m bigger.”

#climatestrike #schoolstrike4climate

Nita Alexander Twitter

Crowds are gathering in front of the Old Treasury 

Building for today’s #ClimateStrike @abcmelbourne 

Andie Noonan Twitter

Martin Place, Sydney. 
Photograph: Mike Bowers for the Guardian 

Martin Place, Sydney. 
Photograph: Mike Bowers for the Guardian 

It’s brilliance is in it’s simplicity. #climatestrike 

Ira Snave Twitter

Martin Place, Sydney. 
Photograph: Mike Bowers for the Guardian

Clean up our planet, it's not Uranus.
 #climatestrike School Strike 4 Climate Twitter

This is what democracy looks like #CLIMATESTRIKE 
School Strike 4 Climate Twitter

Hundreds of Central Vic kids heading to #StrikeForClimate.  
Claire Flanagan-Smit Twitter

I’ll let the kids answer this one: pic.twitter.com/Q8tmE6QBA7.  
Claire Flanagan-Smit Twitter

Links

• Australian Students Stage School Strikes Over Climate Change Inaction
• Climate change: Australian students skip school for mass protest
• Students strike for climate change protests, defying calls to stay in school
• Yes, Prime Minister, I'm Striking From School: Consider It A Climate Lesson
• Climate Change Threatens Our Children's Health As Well As Their Future
• 'We'll Be Voting Soon': Students Take On PM Over Climate Change
• Climate change strike: thousands of school students join national protest
• Hundreds of students striking over climate change descend on parliament
• Australian students plan school strikes to protest against climate inaction
• Australia relationship with Pacific on climate change 'dysfunctional' and 'abusive'
• Tony Abbott says climate change is 'probably doing good'
• Australia's chief scientist compares Trump to Stalin over climate censorship
• Climate campaigners start 'hunger strike' to block Queensland coal project

The World Needs To Quit Coal. Why Is It So Hard?

New York Times - Somini Sengupta

An open pit mine in Burdwan, West Bengal, India. Coal is the single largest source of electricity worldwide. Rebecca Conway for The New York Times

HANOI, Vietnam — Coal, the fuel that powered the industrial age, has led the planet to the brink of catastrophic climate change.
Scientists have repeatedly warned of its looming dangers, most recently on Friday, when a major scientific report issued by 13 United States government agencies warned that the damage from climate change could knock as much as 10 percent off the size of the American economy by century’s end if significant steps aren’t taken to rein in warming.
An October report from the United Nations’ scientific panel on global warming found that avoiding the worst devastation would require a radical transformation of the world economy in just a few years.
Central to that transformation: Getting out of coal, and fast.
And yet, three years after the Paris agreement, when world leaders promised action, coal shows no sign of disappearing. While coal use looks certain to eventually wane worldwide, according to the latest assessment by the International Energy Agency, it is not on track to happen anywhere fast enough to avert the worst effects of climate change. Last year, in fact, global production and consumption increased after two years of decline.
Cheap, plentiful and the most polluting of fossil fuels, coal remains the single largest source of energy to generate electricity worldwide. This, even as renewables like solar and wind power are rapidly becoming more affordable. Soon, coal could make no financial sense for its backers.
So, why is coal so hard to quit?
Because coal is a powerful incumbent. It’s there by the millions of tons under the ground. Powerful companies, backed by powerful governments, often in the form of subsidies, are in a rush to grow their markets before it is too late. Banks still profit from it. Big national electricity grids were designed for it. Coal plants can be a surefire way for politicians to deliver cheap electricity — and retain their own power. In some countries, it has been a glistening source of graft.
And even while renewables are spreading fast, they still have limits: Wind and solar power flow when the breeze blows and the sun shines, and that requires traditional electricity grids to be retooled.
“The main reason why coal sticks around is, we built it already,” said Rohit Chandra, who earned a doctoral degree in energy policy at Harvard, specializing in coal in India.
The battle over the future of coal is being waged in Asia.

A coal-fired power plant under construction in Ramagundam, Telangana State, India. Rebecca Conway for The New York Times

The control room of a power plant in Mancherial, Telangana. Rebecca Conway for The New York Times

The world’s coal juggernaut
Home to half the world’s population, Asia accounts for three-fourths of global coal consumption today. More important, it accounts for more than three-fourths of coal plants that are either under construction or in the planning stages — a whopping 1,200 of them, according to Urgewald, a German advocacy group that tracks coal development. Heffa Schücking, who heads Urgewald, called those plants “an assault on the Paris goals.”
Indonesia is digging more coal. Vietnam is clearing ground for new coal-fired power plants. Japan, reeling from 2011 nuclear plant disaster, has resurrected coal.
The world’s juggernaut, though, is China. The country consumes half the world’s coal. More than 4.3 million Chinese are employed in the country’s coal mines. China has added 40 percent of the world’s coal capacity since 2002, a huge increase for just 16 years. “I had to do the calculation three times,” said Carlos Fernández Alvarez, a senior energy analyst at the International Energy Agency. “I thought it was wrong. It’s crazy.”
Spurred by public outcry over air pollution, China is now also the world leader in solar and wind power installation, and its central government has tried to slow down coal plant construction. But an analysis by Coal Swarm, a U.S.-based team of researchers that advocates for coal alternatives, concluded that new plants continue to be built, and other proposed projects have simply been delayed rather than stopped. Chinese coal consumption grew in 2017, though at a far slower pace than before, and is on track to grow again in 2018, after declining in previous years.
China’s coal industry is now scrambling to find new markets, from Kenya to Pakistan. Chinese companies are building coal plants in 17 countries, according to Urgewald. Its regional rival, Japan, is in the game too: nearly 60 percent of planned coal projects developed by Japanese companies are outside the country, mostly financed by Japanese banks.
That contest is particularly stark in Southeast Asia, one of the world’s last frontiers of coal expansion.

An open pit mine in Sindh Province, Pakistan. Rizwan Tabassum/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

A cooling tower at a coal-fired plant in Hebei Province, China. More than 4.3 million workers are employed in the country’s coal mines. Kim Kyung Hoon/Reuters

‘Even the trees are dying’
Nguy Thi Khanh has seen the contest close-up in Vietnam. Born in 1976, a year after the end of the war, she remembers doing homework by the light of a kerosene lamp. In her northern village, the electricity failed several hours a day. When it rained, there was no power at all. When it came, it came from a coal plant not far away. When her mother hung laundry to dry, ash settled on the clothes.
Today, pretty much every household in Vietnam, population 95 million, has electricity. Hanoi, the capital, where Ms. Nguy now lives, is in a frenzy of new construction, with soaring demand for cement and steel — both energy guzzlers. The economy is galloping. And, up and down the coast, 1,600 kilometers in length, foreign companies, mainly from Japan and China, are building coal plants.
One such project is in Nghi Son, a onetime fishing village south of Hanoi and now home to a sprawling industrial zone. The first power plant opened here in 2013. Japan’s overseas aid organization, the Japan International Cooperation Agency, paid for it. The Japanese trading house Marubeni developed it.
A second coal-fired power plant, far bigger, is under construction next door. Marubeni is building that too, along with a Korean company. The Japan Bank for International Cooperation, an export credit agency meant to lower financial risk for private lenders, is helping to fund it.
In the shadow of the smokestack, Nguyen Thi Thu Thien was drying shrimp on the side of the road and complaining bitterly. She had moved out of her house after the power plant built an ash pond right in front. “The coal dust has blackened my house,” she said. “Even the trees are dying. We can’t live there.”
She and the others drying shrimp on the road were doubly angry that the new plant would need a new port, and that would displace their husbands, who tie up their fishing boats there.
Trucks rumbled by, throwing up dust, as the women emptied their baskets of shrimp. They kept every bit of themselves covered: wide brimmed hats, face masks, gloves.
Coal accounts for 36 percent of the country’s power generation capacity now; it is projected to grow to 42 percent by 2030, according to the government. To feed those plants, Vietnam will need to import 90 million tons of coal by 2030.
But coal projects are also sparking community opposition rare in a country that squelches dissent. Villagers blocked a highway in 2015 to protest a Chinese project in the southeast. The provincial authorities quashed another proposed plant in the Mekong Delta.
Most plants in Vietnam use old, polluting technologies that many investors, including Marubeni, have recently promised not to back in future projects. A company spokesman said by email that it would continue with the Nghi Son project “to contribute to stable power supply and to economic growth.”
Vietnam says it is on track to meet its emissions reductions targets under the Paris accord. So, too, China and India, with far bigger carbon footprints. But those targets were set by the countries themselves, and they will not be enough to keep global temperatures from rising to calamitous levels. The United States has said it will exit the Paris climate pact.
Those sobering facts loom over the next round of international climate negotiations, starting Dec. 3 in the heart of Poland’s coal country. The American delegation plans to promote coal at the event, just as it did at last year’s talks in Bonn, Germany.

A potent political force

A miner in Telegana State, which, until recently, suffered chronic power failures. Rebecca Conway for The New York Times

In the public imagination, the coal miner has long been a symbol of industrial virility, a throwback to an era when hard labor — particularly men’s labor, rather than robots — fueled economic growth.
That idea has been central to politics. German coal miners have lifted the fortunes of that country’s far-right party. Poland’s right-wing government has promised to open new coal mines. Australia’s prime minister, Scott Morrison, rose to power as a champion of coal.
President Trump has promised, unsuccessfully so far, to revive coal mining jobs and instructed his Environmental Protection Agency to roll back rules to reduce emissions from coal-fired power plants.
That message might be welcome in American coal country, but the industry’s future in the United States is not promising. There are cheaper fuels, including natural gas; gas now accounts for around 31 percent of total power generation in the United States, the same share as coal. China has imposed tariffs on coal imports from the United States, in the tit-for-tat trade dispute. More than 200 coal plants have closed since 2010, and coal consumption has continued to decline, contrary to Mr. Trump’s false claims. Coal mining jobs have plummeted over the last decade, despite a modest increase of about 4 percent in the first 18 months of the Trump presidency.

‘We have coal. We are producing more every year.’
The economics, and the political calculus, are very different in the world’s biggest democracy: India, population 1.3 billion.
Ajay Mishra, the career civil servant in charge of energy in the central Indian state of Telangana, knows firsthand.
Five years ago, he said, daily power cuts cursed his state. Ceiling fans cut out on stifling summer afternoons. Factories ran on diesel-guzzling generators. The people of Telangana were furious.
State officials had to do something to fix the electricity problem. They harnessed the sun, briefly making Telangana a leading solar power producer in India. They also turned to what government officials have relied on for over a century: the vast vein of coal that sat underground, stretching across the hills and forests of central India.
Telangana now has round-the-clock electricity. Its farmers get it free to pump water. It sweetens the re-election bid of Telangana’s top elected official, K. Chandrashekar Rao, in state polls later this year.
“We have coal,” Mr. Mishra said. “We are producing more every year. For the next 100 years we have it.”
On a warm Tuesday in October, about a four-hour drive from Hyderabad, the capital of Telangana, an army of men in indigo shorts went underground to dig it out.
A simple pulley drew them in, a bit like a ski lift, except here, it took them deeper and deeper down a shaft. The creak of the pulley was all you could hear, and water, drip-dripping inside the earth. Here and there, off to the side, stood miners, their forms barely visible in the darkness, except for the belted flashlights that snaked across their bodies.
At about 900 feet below the surface, where the air was black and cool and the coal under our feet was squishy, a burst of explosives broke down a wall of coal. Small, sooty chunks were piled into tubs and wheeled out, then loaded onto coal trucks that hurtled down the country roads, sprinkling a layer of ash everywhere.

Miners reinforced the roof of a coal pit in Telangana. Rebecca Conway for The New York Times

A power station in Telangana. Rebecca Conway for The New York Times

So deeply is India invested in coal, this, like other mines, is state owned. So are most power plants. Coal subsidizes the country’s vast rail network.
That person at the top of that system, India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, has sought to cast himself as a champion of clean energy.
But Mr. Modi has been inaugurating new coal mines, too. His government has made it faster for industry, including mining, to get environmental clearances, rankling environmentalists. India’s state-owned companies are building new coal-fired plants across the country, almost all of them financed by public sector banks.
In an interview in the capital, New Delhi, India’s energy secretary, Ajay Bhalla, said some 50 gigawatts of additional coal capacity were under construction. That’s a fraction of what was under development even a decade ago, when India’s energy demand was projected to soar. Many of those plants are meant to replace older, more polluting ones. But coal would not sunset anytime soon, he predicted, not until there’s a cheap and efficient way to store energy from solar and wind energy.
Analysts say India must retool its electricity grid for the post-coal era. Battery technology is fast advancing. Microgrids can replace traditional electricity systems. Many existing coal plants are now running below capacity, several are idle, and new energy efficiency standards could slow down demand to the point where there may be a glut of costly coal-fired plants. Left holding this bundle of stranded assets: The public sector banks that financed them.
For now, though, coal accounts for 58 percent of India’s energy mix.
“It’s not that I’m using the coal very willingly,” Mr. Bhalla said. “But I have to.”

A coal worker in Telegana. The state now has round-the-clock power. Rebecca Conway for The New York Times

Links

• The National Mining Association writes that high-efficiency technologies that slash emissions are available.
• German Coal Commission Says Report on Exit From Coal Completely Unfounded
• Coal Miner to Trump: “Coal Mining Isn’t Coming Back”
• What Is Coal Ash and Why Is It Dangerous?
• Weakening Rules on Coal Plant Emissions
• Trump’s Plan for Coal Emissions: Let Coal States Regulate Them
• Why ‘Green’ Germany Remains Addicted to Coal
• U.S. Climate Report Warns of Damaged Environment and Shrinking Economy 
• What’s New in the Latest U.S. Climate Assessment