“Coal Me, Irresponsible”

King coal is the number one generator of electrical power on earth. And the United States is the Saudi Arabia of coal, with producers from Pennsylvania to West Virginia chunking, tunneling and digging away to make sure the U.S. continues to have enough electricity for all of its business and residential needs. Burning coal even powers a lot of Teslas, Volts, and a whole host of plug-in electric cars.

We are pretty dependent on the stuff, and researchers have been trying to design cleaner coal-fired plants to replace the mega-polluting behemoths of old. But that research has only taken the clean-up effort so far; the myth of “clean coal” is exactly that… a myth. The solution has been to pump the effluents from the coal-burning power-generating process deep into the earth… pollutants for future generations to deal with. This “sweeping under the rug” scenario will come back to haunt us sooner rather than later.

Basically, there really isn’t a viable scientist out there who has a commercially viable process to produce truly clean coal, and while a new such coal plant is being built every week or two in China to keep up with massive power needs, the air quality in urban centers in the People’s Republic speaks for itself. Bottom line: nobody really believes that coal is the long-term solution to sustainable power generation. No one except coal barons and their investors, and the well-paid politicians who support their cause, deny man-impacted climate change and get reelected with full campaign coffers, year after year.

So let’s scrape the surface of the mercenary evaluators who bet – with their own cash – on the economic prospects for any company, technology or industry. On March 16^th, “the Sierra Club and CoalSwarm, keeper of the global coal plant tracker database, released a comprehensive report on the global coal pipeline -- and the news is big. The global boom in coal-fired power plant construction is going bust.

“Since 2010, for every coal plant completed worldwide, two proposed coal plants have been shelved or cancelled. We have known for a while that the coal industry was facing serious headwinds -- even banks like Citi and Goldman Sachs have been warning of coal's impending decline -- but the scale of project failure should be a wake-up call to anyone who still thinks the coal industry's salvation lies in a 21st century global coal boom.

“Globally, in 2014, for the first time ever, carbon emissions were flat as the world economy grew, largely due to reduced coal use and the expansion of clean energy. Even as coal use continues its rapid decline in the United States with 187 coal plants announced for retirement since 2010, thanks in large part to widespread grassroots pressure from communities demanding an end to deadly pollution, the U.S. coal industry was counting on a booming exports business to keep it afloat. But today's report shows this is simply not going to happen.

“According to this new report, coal use in China declined for the first time in 2014 while the economy simultaneously grew at 7.3 percent, proving that coal is not synonymous with growth. The picture in India is even more dismal for coal companies looking to the subcontinent for salvation. There, for every one project that was completed, six were shelved or cancelled. And that coal renaissance that was supposedly going to take place in Europe? In the EU, retired coal capacity outpaced new capacity by 22 percent. Nowhere is the European shift away from coal more apparent than in the UK [also a big coal producer], where the leaders of the three main political parties recently made a joint commitment to accelerate the shift to a low carbon economy and end the use of unabated coal for electricity.”Huffington Post, March 16^th.

This doesn’t mean that air quality is going to improve anytime soon, and as you can see in the comparison of the above NASA photos (1980 and 2003; it’s much worse today) of the northern polar ice cap, we face a whole lot more damage from climate change than any near-term change in coal usage can contain. And there are still lots of folks who think coal is still coming back. “While larger trends are turning against coal, there are still over 1,000 gigawatts of new coal-fired generation proposed worldwide. This may not be enough to revive the coal industry in the face of accelerating coal plant retirements, but it is enough to devastate the climate and public health. To avoid catastrophic climate disruption and the global instability and human suffering that will result, we must continue building on the progress found in the report to phase out coal plants and replace them with clean energy.” Huffington Post.

It‘s time to reprioritize our national fuel policies so that we stop killing ourselves. Wall Street sees the writing on the wall. Folks who build coal plants are getting the message. King coal must abdicate. Now!

I’m Peter Dekom, and living in the real world just seems to threaten too many incumbents, their “bought and paid for” politicians, and the fools who buy into their intentionally false messages and vote against their own best interests.