It’s Friday, July 2, and the U.K. is accelerating its deadline for quitting coal.
The United Kingdom is planning to end all coal-fired electricity generation by October 2024, moving up the country’s previous target by a full year. The new timeline is designed to “send a clear signal around the world that the U.K. is leading the way in consigning coal power to the history books,” said Anne-Marie Trevelyan, the country’s energy and climate change minister, in a statement on Wednesday. The announcement comes months before the United Nations’ annual climate change summit, COP26, which will be hosted in November in Glasgow.
Ending coal-fired electricity does not mean ending coal extraction. The U.K. will still be mining coal for export and using it in industrial processes like steel production, and a heavily protested brand-new coal mine is still under consideration in Northern England.
Despite these caveats, any move to reduce coal consumption is good for the climate. Coal-fired electricity is extremely carbon-intensive, accounting for 30 percent of energy-related CO2 emissions globally. It’s also a major source of fine particulate matter, a deadly air pollutant; fine particulate pollution from fossil fuels killed 8.7 million people globally in 2018.
Sam Fankhauser, a professor of climate change economics and policy at the University of Oxford, told Forbes that the target “merely formalizes a development that has all but been secured already through a combination of market forces, renewable subsidies, and climate and environmental policies.” Nonetheless, Fankhauser called the accelerated timeline “a welcome milestone of big symbolic value.”
The Smog
Need-to-know basis
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