Coal: the United States promotes while Canada and Europe move beyond - Environment Watch Environmental Watch

On November 24, 2003, the U.S. Congress abandoned hope of passing an energy bill laden with subsidies for fossil fuels, including coal. While the White House strongly supports heavy subsidies to expand coal burning, other industrial nations, including Canada, are turning away from this climate-disruptive fuel.

In Ontario, Canada's most populous province, the three major political parties agreed in early 2003 to phase out that province's rive large coal-fired power plants by 2015. This bold plan accelerated with the October 2003 election of Premier Dalton McGuinty, who has pledged to close all the coal-fired power plants by 2007, eight years ahead of the earlier deadline.

The goal is to dean up air locally and help stabilize climate globally. In terms of cutting carbon emissions, shutting down just the huge Nanticoke power station on the shore of Lake Erie would be the equivalent to taking four million cars off Canadian roads.

Ontario is the first Canadian province to turn its back on coal. Its political leaders simply concluded that the health and environmental costs of coal burning are too high. Jack Gibbons, director of the Ontario Clear Air Alliance, calls coal "a nineteenth century fuel that has no place in twenty-first century Ontario." Other East Canadian provinces including Nova Scotia and New Brunswick may soon follow its lead.

Several leading industrial countries are also turning away from coal, including the United Kingdom and Germany. The United Kingdom, which used coal to launch the Industrial Revolution more than two centuries ago, cut coal use by 40 percent between 1990 and 2001, mainly by substituting natural gas. Germany--Europe's largest industrial economy--cut coal use by a comparable 41 percent from 1990 to 2001. Reduced subsidies, gains in energy productivity, and the massive harnessing of wind energy means coal use may be on its way out in Germany as well.

Although some major industrial countries--such as the United States and Japan--are still increasing their use of coal, world use has changed little in the last rive years. And the movement to phase out coal is gaining momentum. Britain's business-oriented Economist magazine, which surprised many readers in July 2002 with a cover story entitled "Coal: Environmental Enemy Number 1." is urging adoption of a carbon tax to discourage coal use.

If global temperatures continue to rise and the world experiences more crop-withering heat waves of the sort that shrunk the grain harvests of India and the United States in 2002 and Europe in 2003--not to mention the life-threatening heat wave that claimed thirty-five thousand European lives in August 2003--the pressure to move away from coal will intensify.

There are two primary ways of reducing coal use. One is raising energy productivity. The other is shifting to less carbon-intensive sources of energy. A quick example of the latter is that, if a world increasingly concerned about climate change were to decide that over the next three years all incandescent light bulbs would be replaced with the compact fluorescent bulbs--which use less than a third as much electricity--hundreds of coal-fired power plants could be closed.

On the renewable side, wind power, now expanding by over 30 percent a year, is on its way to becoming one of the world's leading sources of electricity. Europe is the leader with twenty-four thousand megawatts of generation capacity. In early October 2003, the European Wind Energy Association (EWEA) updated its projections for wind electric generation, raising them by one-fourth to 75,000 megawatts by 2010 and to 180,000 megawatts by 2020. In 2020, EWEA projects that wind-generated electricity will satisfy the residential electricity needs of 194 million Europeans, half the region's population.

As if on cue, two weeks later the United Kingdom approved construction of four new massive offshore wind farms. Western Europe, with enough offshore wind (out to a depth of forty meters) to satisfy most of its electricity needs, is fast turning to this new source. The North Sea is rich in both oil and wind. And while its oil is being depleted, its wind isn't.

Solar cell use worldwide also is expanding by over 30 percent a year. The cost of solar- cell-generated electricity is falling steadily but lags the fall in the cost of wind power by roughly a decade.

Unfortunately, the United States is falling behind in development of alternative energy sources, particularly wind and solar energy. Once a leader in wind electricity generation, it has ceded leadership to Europe. And in solar cell production it recently has been eclipsed by Japan. If Congress resuscitates the energy bill in 2004, it should consider the global environmental consequences of its actions, the job-creating potential of these new energy sources, and the long term costs of lagging in the development of these new energy industries.

Lester R. Brown is president of the Earth Policy Institute, author of Plan B: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble, and the American Humanist Association's 1991 Humanist of the Year.

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