Any hope of a sustainable return to the environment is fading as nations emerge from the shadows of COVID-19 and are struggling to resurrect flat-line economies. Back in May, the International Energy Agency ( IEA) predicted not only that an 8 per cent reduction in global carbon emissions would be recorded in 2020 but also that the crisis would wipe out the demand for fossil fuels. It has since emerged that while carbon dioxide emissions, for example, have actually fallen by a quarter at the height of the global lockdown, daily output is now back to within 5% of normal – and rising faster than anyone imagined.
Even the IEA seems to have given up wishful thinking. It calculates that governments will spend $9 trillion over the next few months on kickstarting economies, and that very little of that money is likely to be invested in renewable energy projects in the interest of short-term necessity. It also admitted that the world's predictions of peak oil were "overhyped." Indeed, demand for oil and gas is likely to increase at record rates over the coming year.
But increased oil production is not the only obstacle to the achievement of climate change targets. Actually, it's not even the biggest one.
Coal was the king before oil. It was the dirty black stuff that fueled the industrial revolution, choked cities and their citizens, and set the planet on track for today's climate crisis. But it would be very wrong to think that coal was a thing of the past. Today, it remains the world's largest single source of electricity, generating 38% of all electricity in 2018.
China is by far the biggest user. Of the 1.8 million megawatts of global coal-fired power generation in 2019 , China was responsible for 1 million megawatts.
For three reasons, China is the world's factory. It has a vast pool of cheap labor, lax labor laws, and vast reserves of easily mined coal. In 2019, 60% of the country's energy was coal-fired. Climate science analysts CarbonBrief say China's economic miracle, "has been built on a coal-fired energy boom, which means that China has also by far become the world's largest carbon polluter."
China is not the only one to blame. Coal is the dirty little secret of the world. There are currently 2,485 coal-fired power plants in operation around the world, with more than 560 in operation. China's closest rivals are India, with 294 plants supplying three quarters of the country's electricity and another 60 in the pipeline, and the US, which operates 280 plants but has no plans at least to build new ones. The UAE, which produces oil, is also building its first coal plant. By 2023, the Hassyan power plant in Dubai will supply electricity to 250,000 households.
The problem with coal is that there's so much to it, and it's easy to get to. There are 1.1 trillion tons of proven coal reserves worldwide, enough to last around 150 years – three times as long as the world's accessible oil and gas reserves.
The World Coal Association (WCA) spends a lot of time talking up what it calls “the pathway toward zero emissions from coal.” But this amounts to two as yet immature technologies: High Efficiency, Low Emission (HELE) and Carbon Capture Use and Storage (CCUS). The WCA says both are “critical to meeting energy needs and our climate goals”. Unfortunately, neither of them is going to have any appreciable impact on global warming before it is much too late.
The function of HELE technologies is to increase the amount of energy that can be extracted from a coal unit. But even though it is already available, HELE is expensive to fit retrospectively and not widely used.
CCUS technology is also far from being a meaningful reality. The WCA acknowledges that "the current rate of CCUS deployment is too slow to allow the necessary emission reduction targets to be achieved."
According to the Global CCS Institute, a think tank dedicated to accelerating the deployment of carbon capture and storage, there are only 19 large installations operating globally, capturing less than 0.1% of total carbon emissions.
Two of the most significant are the Petra Nova Coal Plant in Texas and the Emirate Steel Industries of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company. But the carbon they extract is not stored securely underground. It is injected into otherwise difficult-to-tap oil reservoirs, releasing more fossil fuels. Oh, what an irony.
As the pandemic has shown, the only viable way to bring about a sufficiently rapid slowdown in climate change is to reduce global energy consumption. Unfortunately, everything about the way we live today is at odds with this; the success of every company, city and nation depends on constant growth and expansion. Consumer societies are based on the consumption of goods, from household cleaning materials and garden furniture to smartphones and computers — and today much of this comes from the coal-hungry China.
If it helps, the next time you shop online, try to imagine a coal-fired furnace roaring into life in a distant Chinese city when you click the "Buy Now" button. Because as economies inevitably rebound, be sure that China's factories will be overdriven to meet global demand, and more and more coal will be burned on the altar of economic recovery.
