Coal production
More coal despite the climate crisis: production at its highest level
Burning coal fuels global warming. A number of countries actually want to say goodbye to this form of energy production. But numbers speak a different language.
Despite its enormous damage to the climate, energy production from coal continues to increase – and there are few concrete plans to phase it out. This is the central result of a current evaluation by the environmental organization Urgewald, which, together with other organizations, maintains a large public database on the coal industry – called the Global Coal Exit List. Today, the coal-fired power plants installed worldwide have a capacity of 2,126 gigawatts – which is a good 11 percent more than in 2015, when the global community agreed on the Paris climate target to curb global warming.
Last year alone, 30 gigawatts of capacity were added – which corresponds to an increase that is larger than Poland’s entire coal-fired power plant capacity. A large proportion of the new power plants are being built in China – where renewable energies are also being developed on a large scale.
Coal production at a new high
“Nine years after the signing of the Paris Agreement, the production of thermal coal has reached a new high and the global coal power plant fleet is still growing,” says Urgewald managing director Heffa Schücking, according to the statement.
At the climate conference in Dubai last year, more than 130 countries agreed to the goal of phasing out coal-fired power generation. However, according to the evaluation, there is a great lack of concrete implementation of this goal: of the coal companies included in the database, according to Urgewald, less than five percent have so far announced a specific exit date.
Coal phase-out is crucial for climate goals
According to the International Energy Agency and the United Nations, industrialized countries must phase out coal in the next few years and other countries by 2040 at the latest to still have a chance of meeting the 1.5 degree target.
The Paris climate target refers to the effort to limit global warming to well below 2 degrees compared to pre-industrial times – and if possible to just 1.5 degrees. The UN climate summit in Paris in 2015 agreed on this goal and later reaffirmed it several times at climate conferences. This is intended to avoid the worst consequences of the climate crisis – such as more frequent and severe heat waves, droughts, forest fires as well as storms and floods.
dpa
Source: Stern
