That “offers a loophole,” said Jennifer Morgan, executive director of Greenpeace International. “This is one more nail in the coffin of coal, but only one, and the coffin is not yet sealed,” Ms. Morgan added.
said on Twitter Thursday that the deal allowed Poland to depart from coal by 2049. Poland currently gets 70 percent of its electricity from coal and has often resisted European proposals to shift more rapidly away from fossil fuels.
The Biden administration did
join an agreement on Thursday to end financing for “unabated” oil, gas and coal in other countries by the end of next year. Unabated refers to power plants that burn fossil fuels and discharge the pollution directly into the air, without any attempt to capture the emissions.
That agreement is expected to significantly help steer public financing from multilateral development funders, such as the World Bank, away from fossil fuels. The 25 countries and entities in that pact, which include Italy, Canada and Denmark, have promised to prioritize support for low and zero-carbon energy like wind, solar and geothermal.
The decision to stop financing overseas fossil fuel development, paired with investments in green energy is “really significant,” said Rachel Kyte of the Fletcher School at Tufts University.
“If we were just saying no to brown energy, then the political tensions between developing countries and developed countries would just escalate,” she said.
Republicans in the United States criticized the Biden administration’s pledge to end oil, gas and coal financing — noting the absence from the agreements of China, Japan and South Korea, some of the world’s biggest backers of foreign oil and gas projects.
“This agreement opens the door for China & Russia to fund the same production, but with their nonexistent environmental standards,” Senator Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana wrote on Twitter “Patting yourself on the back and pretending to make a difference does nothing if it only leads to higher global emissions.”
Others noted the move could easily be reversed by a future administration.
“If there’s no law that would lock in a new administration in, I don’t know how the U.S. would be bound to uphold it,” George David Banks, who served as former President Donald J. Trump’s international energy adviser.
The promise to end coal comes as coal consumption is making a resurgence globally after years of steady decline. This year, coal consumption worldwide is expected to grow by 5.7 percent as the global economy rebounds from the coronavirus pandemic and is now just below its peak set in 2014,
according to new data published Thursday by the Global Carbon Project. China’s government recently ordered coal companies to increase their mining output to manage
an electricity shortage that has led to rolling blackouts nationwide.
The World Coal Association did not respond to a request for comment about the new announcement but earlier this week said efforts to eliminate coal ignored the fact that coal “remains a critical to energy supply in 80 countries and the livelihood of more than 790 million people who have no access to reliable and affordable power.”
Some of those countries signed the pledge. Ukraine, the third biggest consumer of coal in Europe, said Wednesday
that it would aim to end coal use by 2035. Chile, which has previously pledged to close all of its remaining coal plants by 2040, said it would speed up its timeline.
The pledge would require some nations to make major changes. Vietnam, for example, would have to significantly revise
recent plans to double its coal capacity by 2030.
Developing countries
are likely to require outside financial help to wean themselves off coal, which has long been prized as a cheap source of energy for factories and homes. Indonesia, which signed the pledge,
had earlier said it could phase out its coal-fired power plants by 2040 but only if it gets financial aid. The country is the world’s eighth-largest emitter and gets roughly two-thirds of its electricity from coal.
to help coal-reliant South Africa shift to cleaner energy. The Asian Development Bank also launched a new fund that will buy coal power plants in Asia in order to shut them early, although some critics have questioned how effective that plan will be.
One question left unanswered in the coal pledge is whether countries may turn instead to natural gas to meet their energy needs. Gas produces about half the carbon dioxide than coal when burned for fuel but is still a major source of greenhouse gas emissions.[/quote]