The United States committed Saturday to the idea of phasing out coal power plants, joining 56 other nations in kicking the coal habit that’s a huge factor in global warming.
U.S. Special Envoy John Kerry announced that America was joining the Powering Past Coal Alliance, which means the Biden Administration commits to building no new coal plants and phasing out existing plants. No date was given for when the existing plants would have to go, but other Biden regulatory actions and international commitments already in the works had meant no coal by 2035.
“We will be working to accelerate unabated coal phase-out across the world, building stronger economies and more resilient communities,” Kerry said in a statement. “The first step is to stop making the problem worse: stop building new unabated coal power plants.”
Coal power plants have already been shutting down across the nation due to economics, and no new coal facilities were in the works, so “we were heading to retiring coal by the end of the decade anyway,” said climate analyst Alden Meyer of the European think-tank E3G. That’s because natural gas and renewable energy are cheaper, so it was market forces, he said.
I am of the opinion we could convince china to abandon coal if we helped them get CANDU reactors off the ground.
Their current stock of nuclear reactors are not amazing and because of this a lot of their power production has been coming from coal. I’m not sure they ‘wanted’ to use coal as much as they were forced to due to technological and economic limitations.
Not to mention the plethora of misinformation surrounding nuclear reactors and nuclear waste, but I’m not certain how much of an impact that would have on decisions within the chinese government.