Coal's executioners gather

German ski slope, January 2022

From The Age

The savage winter heat in Europe over recent days has been so surreal that observers are running out of words to describe what they are seeing. Maximiliano Herrera, a climatologist who tracks global weather extremes, told The Washington Post that the weather was “totally insane” and “absolute madness”. The heatwave was, he said, “the most extreme event ever seen in European climatology”.

In Poland, on New Year’s Day, the temperature peaked at almost 19 degrees, 15 above average. In parts of the continent winter temperatures at night were more typical of summer days.

About the same time, a cold snap caused by a polar vortex gripped North America, killing directly and indirectly more than 200 people.

In Australia, the Bureau of Meteorology is predicting that the La Nina weather pattern that has caused both horrific flooding and cooler temperatures across the Southern Hemisphere is showing signs of dissipating. With this climatological Band-Aid torn away, there are fears the fierce heat La Nina’s clouds has protected us from over the past couple of years will suddenly return, exposing us to the true temperatures of a warmer world.

All this comes as Russia’s war of aggression drags towards its second year, causing not just untold misery for millions Ukrainians but a global energy crisis that has propped up demand for dangerous fossil fuels and super profits for the companies that peddle them.

In this context, it is difficult to address positive news on climate action, but it is there and it is worth addressing. According to the International Energy Agency’s most recent report on coal, published last month, the rise in coal demand prompted by the energy crunch was limited to just 1.2 per cent, and it is not expected to last long.

And despite that war-related jump, the global seaborne coal trade in 2022 is likely to have been between 5 and 8 per cent below pre-pandemic levels. Europe’s overwhelming response to the energy crunch has been to buy gas whereever it can find it and to pump eye-bleeding sums of money into energy efficiency measures and renewable energy technology.

Coal’s new high price might be creating short-term profits, but it is also destroying demand.

As a result, the sprawling coalition of government and activist forces dedicated to killing off coal now believes the first phase is already achieved – the pipeline of new coal power stations has effectively been shut.

Countries such as China an India are still building plants permitted and contracted over the past decade, but are rapidly turning towards renewables. At the end of 2021, the coal industry’s key financiers – China, Japan and South Korea – declared they would no longer invest in new offshore coal plants.

As an Australian miner complained in a parliamentary inquiry last year, banks no longer wanted to finance coal projects because the “grief to income ratio” was not worth it. Activist shareholders were becoming too much of a pain.

Camilla Fenning, who leads the coal program for the British-based climate think tank E3G, told me this week the speed of the retreat from coal over the past couple of years has been startling.

“There are now only around 35 countries that have a coal pipeline [of planned new plants],” Fenning said. “None of those are now in Europe, and only four are in the OECD – that’s Turkey, Australia, the US and Japan. Of those 35 countries, something like 16 only have one planned new coal plant, so even they are near the tipping point of no new coal.

“And also, of those 35, probably half of them were dependent on China or Japan or Korean investment, and now they have pulled the plug, it’s pretty unlikely they will get the investment to build. So now we have a domino effect.”

And with coal costs so high, even China’s new plants are running far below capacity.

The problem is that a new coal plant lasts for about 40 years. So even with the pipeline of new plants cut to a trickle, if the existing global fleet is allowed to live for the course of its natural life, the emissions it creates will blow the world’s limited remaining carbon budget to keep warming under 1.5 degrees or even 2 degrees.

So now the anti-coal movement has shifted its attention to how it can most effectively shut them down sooner.

Huge steps were taken in this direction at the last two world climate talks in Glasgow in 2021 and Sharm El-Sheikh in November. In Glasgow, a new model to accelerate the process was finalised and announced.

Under the so-called Just Energy Transition Investment Partnership (or JET IP, as it is now referred to in the jargon-rich world of climate diplomacy) the United States, Britain, Germany, France and the European Union agreed to provide $US8.5 billion ($12.59 billion) in grants and cheap loans as seed money for a fund to purchase and close South Africa’s coal fleet and replace it with renewables.

South Africa is the perfect laboratory for such a program because it has a some of the world’s best access to sun and wind. And because it has, even by a dirty industry’s standards, a particularly dirty coal fleet. As a result, a dollar spent greening South Africa cuts far more carbon than a dollar spent in, say, Europe.

The model is also in keeping with one of the Paris Agreement’s core principles, which recognises that nations have “common but differentiated responsibilities” in tackling climate change.

In simple terms, this means that poor nations agreed to take action if rich ones – which caused the problem in the first place – agreed to pay for it.

In Egypt in November, the JET IP backers and South Africa detailed impressive progress in the plan and now negotiations have begun for similar agreements to accelerate coal retirement in Indonesia and Vietnam. Because each nation has different energy demands and different coal industries, developing the plans is complicated, says energy analyst Tim Buckley.

And care must be taken to ensure the money is well spent. There is no point in buying out a coal plant only to later see it resold, Buckley explains. Nor is there any point in shutting off the power before it is adequately replaced with clean alternatives.

Due to generations of failure to properly address climate change, even this rapid progress is not fast enough, says Fenning. She hopes the South African model will be improved as versions of it are deployed in Indonesia and Vietnam, and then, hopefully, across the world.

Many climate scientists believe the 1.5 degrees target has already slipped from our grasp, though rapid decarbonisation could see temperatures stabilise and then slowly drop by the end of the century.

Until then, we will face unfeasibly warm winters across Europe, and a return to infernal summers in Australia.