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The United States committed Saturday to the idea of phasing out coal power plants, joining 56 other nations in kicking the coal habit that’s a huge factor in global warming.
U.S. Special Envoy John Kerry announced that America was joining the Powering Past Coal Alliance, which means the Biden Administration commits to building no new coal plants and phasing out existing plants. No date was given for when the existing plants would have to go, but other Biden regulatory actions and international commitments already in the works had meant no coal by 2035.
“We will be working to accelerate unabated coal phase-out across the world, building stronger economies and more resilient communities,” Kerry said in a statement. “The first step is to stop making the problem worse: stop building new unabated coal power plants.”
Coal power plants have already been shutting down across the nation due to economics, and no new coal facilities were in the works, so “we were heading to retiring coal by the end of the decade anyway,” said climate analyst Alden Meyer of the European think-tank E3G. That’s because natural gas and renewable energy are cheaper, so it was market forces, he said.
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The United States committed Saturday to the idea of phasing out coal power plants
And switching to natural gas. Sigh.
Well, it is better than coal I suppose. Not enough to keep the planet from boiling but… baby steps?
It’s far too late for baby steps
Guess we should take no steps then.
Obviously no one’s saying that, but thanks for your contribution.
Was no more low-effort than your contribution.
As I understand it, natural gas might be better than coal, but it’s surprisingly not that clear cut:
Methane is 34 times stronger than CO2 at trapping heat over a 100-year period and 86 times stronger over 20 years.
It’s only better if we keep leakage under 3%, but currently leakage is well above that in the US. We need strong regulation and oversight for natural gas to be worth it (which thankfully the Biden administration recently announced). But there’s no replacing moving away from fossil fuels.
NASA just put a sat in orbit that measures the leakages with pin point accuracy…
Knowing the level of leakage and stopping it are two very different things.
We have been measuring atmospheric co2 for at least a century…
Not really in this case. Methane emissions are very specific and do not happen with everything humans do. Co2 is also a very big building block of life itself, Methane isn’t.
We need strong regulation and oversight
You have been permanently banned from c/Conservative.
Until an R manages to gain some semblance of power in that regard.
Koch Brothers must be spinning up their PACs as we read this.
RIP west virginia
I am of the opinion we could convince china to abandon coal if we helped them get CANDU reactors off the ground.
Their current stock of nuclear reactors are not amazing and because of this a lot of their power production has been coming from coal. I’m not sure they ‘wanted’ to use coal as much as they were forced to due to technological and economic limitations.
Not to mention the plethora of misinformation surrounding nuclear reactors and nuclear waste, but I’m not certain how much of an impact that would have on decisions within the chinese government.
I just watched Climate Town’s video ‘Time to let Coal Die’ on YT… The writing is on the wall for coal. There’s no “clean” coal, so let’s kill that industry and have a plan in place to transition those workers over to solar or wind!