Coal news and updates

It won’t be easy to get rid of coal.

 

Worried the nation might miss its 2020 target to drastically cut emissions of carbon dioxide, the German government proposed a steep levy last year on the most heavily polluting generators. The tax was intended to deliver a decisive blow against lignite or brown coal, the dirtiest fuel around and Germany’s main source of electricity.

 

Germany views itself as a leader in the push against climate change. It is probably the world’s most enthusiastic investor in renewable energy, mainly wind and sun. But even the powerful Chancellor Angela Merkel couldn’t quite pull it off.

 

Facing blowback from labor unions and governments in coal country, Berlin backed off, replacing the levy with a subsidy of 1.6 billion euros to gradually mothball eight coal-fired plants and shut them down permanently by 2023.

 

Environmentalists hated it. “Instead of being fined for polluting by the proposed new climate levy, utilities will instead get paid for keeping their oldest and most inefficient lignite plants on standby,” noted a report for Oxfam on Germany’s energy policies by the environmental nonprofit E3G. It “amounts to a golden handshake for utilities at the expense of taxpayers and consumers.”

 

And that wasn’t all. The chancellery also rejected a push by Barbara Hendricks, the environment minister, to establish a road map to the total phaseout of coal, hoping to postpone timing decisions until after national elections next year.

Berlin’s hesitance may seem like little more than a snag in Germany’s vaunted “Energiewende.” At least the coal generators are scheduled to shut down eventually.

 

But the resistance in the greenest of green countries underscores a more substantial challenge to the international effort to drastically reduce fossil fuels in the world’s energy supply: workers and retirees, local economies and communities still depend on the fuels the rest of us hope to let go of to preserve the planet for our children and our children’s children.

 

I’m old enough to remember President Jimmy Carter going on TV on April 18, 1977, declaring a “moral equivalent of war” against dependence on foreign oil, and telling Americans that “we need to shift to plentiful coal.” It seems unfair to simply tell the communities that worked on this shift: “We’re sorry, but it didn’t work out.”

SOurce: NYTimes