Coal news and updates

As of January 2016, the report's authors found, there were nearly 338 gigawatts of coal power capacity under construction worldwide and another 1,085 gigawatts of capacity in various phases of permitting or planning. This is the equivalent of 1,500 large coal plants:

China, India, Vietnam, Indonesia, and South Korea are leading the current coal rush. Japan is also contemplating dozens of new coal-burning units to replace its nuclear fleet, which has been shuttered indefinitely after Fukushima. But it's not just Asia. There are coal plants in the works just about everywhere, save for the United States and Western Europe.

This is a huge deal, environmentally. If we want decent odds of staying below the 2°C global warming threshold, then humanity can only emit another 765 gigatons or so of CO2 into the atmosphere. (A gigaton is a billion tons.) We currently emit about 35 gigatons per year from existing infrastructure, which means our "carbon budget" is rapidly dwindling.

If all the new coal plants now under construction were built and operated for their full lifespans, they'd pump an extra 58 gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere. If all the additional planned/permitted plants were built, that would emit another 186 gigatons of CO2. There are a lot of variables at play here — since you also have to factor in oil and gas infrastructure — but it looks extraordinarily difficult to stay below 2°C if even one-third of these planned coal plants get built.

(Note: This is assuming all coal plants last their full lifespans, usually 40 years or more. It's possible that some plants could get retired early, though that would mean billions in lost revenue. Alternatively, we could figure out how to retrofit existing coal plants so as to capture their CO2 emissions and store them underground, but that technology is not yet widely commercialized.)

Source: vox