This is coal.
And this is what it does to us.
But even though we know how dirty coal is, we can't get enough of it.
Coal powers phones, heats homes and is used to make the concrete and steel our
lives are built around.
Coal use is falling in the US and Europe.
But across Asia it's still king.
Coal is the biggest source of energy in countries like China, India and Indonesia.
They plan to keep mining coal and building plants to burn it.
So how did the world get hooked on coal — and how can we quit the addiction?
The story of coal begins 250 years ago
when British inventors realized you could
heat water with coal to make steam,
spin turbines and power machines.
Actually — let's rewind 300 million years
before the steam engine to carbon-rich plants that died in swamps.
Millions of years of heat and pressure turned these fossils into rocks
packed with energy.
And back in the modern world, that energy was sorely needed.
The Industrial Revolution created machines.
Lots of them.
It led to a global boom in prosperity that was unprecedented in human history.
Governments built railways that linked coal mines to cities.
That helped them feed factories and homes that were hungry for coal.
“There were little to no alternatives.
Therefore it was very rational, it was very understandable and it was not that
controversial.”
This is Pao-Yu Oei.
He's an energy expert who studies how
countries that have invested in coal can
move to cleaner sources of energy.
“For Europe, we can definitely say there has been a very good side of coal
throughout the 20th century...
Economic prosperity came across the continent, as well as peace that went
along with the European Union.”
But the prosperity coal brings comes at a price.
For more than half a century scientists have known that burning fossil fuels
releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and heats the planet.
It's already warmed by more than
1 degree Celsius and is on track
for a catastrophic 3 degrees
by the end of the century.
And coal is behind 40% of the CO2 that comes from burning fuels.
But climate change isn't even the only problem.
Dirty air kills more than
7 million people a year.
It's about as deadly as smoking cigarettes.
Burning coal releases pollutants that get into your lungs and spread through your
bloodstream — even reaching your brain.
In the 1800s doctors already knew that coal was bad for your health.
Miners got sick from breathing in the dust.
Cities were blanketed by fumes that crept into homes and made families cough.
But governments had tied their economies to coal.
And they weren't willing to give it up.
Mining and burning coal damages the climate and hurts people's health.
That's why the UN has called to kick coal
out of the electricity supply by 2030 in
rich countries and by 2040
for the rest of the world.
“We need renewable energy and green jobs.
No more fossil fuel subsidies or new coal-fired power plants.”
So, how's that coming along?
Well, global coal emissions have basically plateaued.
In South America and Africa, coal was barely used in the first place.
In the US and Europe, coal has been declining for decades.
But across Asia, coal just keeps growing.
Last year China and India burned more
than two-thirds of all the coal that
the world burned.
The rest of the continent used more
coal than the EU and US put together.
And the problem isn't just the coal
that's burning today.
The new mines they're opening and power plants they're building are designed to
run for decades.
Now, some Southeast Asian countries cancelled plans to build coal
plants last year.
But India, for instance, wants to invest $55 billion in coal over the next decade.
It needs to spend several times that on renewables to meet its targets.
And then there's China.
It burns half the world's coal but has pledged to slash carbon emissions to
net-zero by 2060.
Here's what a report by two environmental research groups last November found out
about that:
To meet its climate goals, China must ban new coal-powered plants and
double the electricity it makes from wind and solar.
“They are not fully prepared to achieve that.”
This is Shuwei Zhang, lead author of the report.
He says that coal plants built today will become stranded assets that are
unprofitable to keep running.
“The most important thing is that we need
to stop the build of new fossil fuel assets
as soon as possible.”
The industry disagrees.
“The world may not like coal, but the world needs coal.”
This is a speech by the boss of the World Coal Association in September 2020.
“But this is not about being liked
or popular, it's about being realistic.”
The industry argues that it can make coal clean by sucking CO2 out of power plants
and storing it in the ground.
But the technology it's banking on is expensive and doesn't exist at scale yet.
Each year the world can capture about 40 Megatons of CO2 from industrial sites.
Annual carbon emissions are hundreds of times bigger.
So how can countries quit coal – and can China and India learn from
the West's mistakes?
Let's look at the US.
Coal has been declining there for decades
because of cheap alternatives like oil and gas.
And now wind turbines and solar panels are making it fall even faster.
The US closed 36 coal plants last year and has cut its capacity by 25%
in the last decade.
But politicians kept telling coal workers that their future was safe.
“You'll get another job, you won't mine anymore, do you like that idea?
They said no we don't like that idea, we love to mine, that's what we want to do.
I said if that's what you want to do, that's what you're going to do.”
Trump's moved on.
But he wasn't alone.
“This is coal.
Don't be afraid, don't be scared, it won't hurt you.
It's coal.”
Scientists have a problem: governments need to quit coal to
keep us safe.
But they also need to protect the livelihoods of communities who
live from it.
That's what Germany did.
It closed its final hard coal mine in 2018 after 60 years of steady decline and did
so without firing a single miner.
The government retrained younger miners and paid out older ones who wanted
to retire early.
But scientists say the energy transition needs to be fair and fast.
Germany dragged out its transition over decades and even last year it was still
building plants to burn coal.
Researchers at the Technical University of Berlin in 2019 found that a quicker
phase-out would have cost less and let mining communities adapt better.
“Clinging on for too long with an old dying industry has a tendency not to
support new alternative industries.
Because these are being seen as a kind of competition that might speed up the process.”
So what can coal-hungry countries like India, where more than
700,000 people work as miners, take away from this?
Well, first, politicians should be honest
with voters that coal's era is over –
and set a clear end date.
Then instead of subsidizing coal
companies, governments could put the money
into retraining workers and making new industries for their families.
"Not moving, not trying to look for a plan B, is the worst thing you can do, because
otherwise in 10 years' time the last mine will close, no matter what you want, and
then there's nothing left."
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