The UK has just had another week when no electricity generated by coal burning was used by the National Grid. Unabated coal generation will be phased out entirely by 2025 when further regulatory changes on CO2 emissions will mean no coal can be used without carbon capture and storage. No current operator is planning to install CCS equipment.
The UK went a record 114 hours without using coal power over the [May 6] Bank Holiday weekend, its longest consecutive period without drawing on the principal cause of global warming since the start of the Industrial Revolution.
The record means the UK National Grid has operated without any reliance on coal for more than 1,000 hours so far in 2019, as total coal power use has dropped by almost two-thirds compared with the first four months of 2018, from 8.6Twh to just 2.9Twh.
Conditions were particularly favorable to wind and solar power generation, despite not being ideal holiday weather. Last year the 10% of UK electricity was generated using coal. If the identified trend continues, this could be under 4% in 2019. In contrast, last year the USA generated 27% using coal and is projected to stiil generate 24% this year. The situation in North America is not all bad.
In addition, the UK government is using the coal transition to build greater multilateral cooperation for tackling climate change, through the Powering Past Coal Alliance. Launched by the UK and Canada, the voluntary coalition of governments, businesses, and other organisations committed to ending the use of coal power has seen its ranks swell in recent months. Its 80 members now include the South Chungcheong province of South Korea, which hosts half of that country's coal power generation, as well as a host of cities and businesses.
As the link points out, there are social consequences for former mining areas in this move to decarbonise the economy. This can be by schemes for retraining or bringing new industries, like wind turbine production to such areas. Facilities to build and service off-shore oil rigs can be adapted to provide off-shore wind farms. In parts of rural Britain, new tourism facilities have taken over abandoned open-cast mines (e.g. the Eden Project) but that is helped by the amount of leisure and vacation time that British workers have, certainly compared to those in the US.
Trump’s environmentally hostile policies may well have devastating effects on US industry. First of all, there is an amount of reluctance by companies to invest in greener technology if they believe it would put them at a competitive disadvantage. This rush to the bottom may be counter-productive as other countries are proposing to use Trump’s favorite weapon on trade tariffs to protect their own industries which have made changes. President Macron has proposed such a scheme for trade between EU countries and between the EU and third countries.
Macron reiterated his goal to put fighting climate change at the center of his government’s policies as well as those of the European Union, calling for a “carbon tax on borders” for the bloc.
“The success of this transition goes through our European commitment, our capacity to defend at the European level the need to achieve a carbon price,” he said, according to a translation.
Macron did not get into specifics, but such a measure would likely mean a carbon tax in E.U. member countries coupled with a fee on imports from non-E.U. countries that don’t have their own carbon tax or another form of carbon pricing.
It’s not inconceivable that such a policy would mean significant job movement from countries without climate change measures (say the USA) to others that do (e.g. Canada).