Power shift: EU coal output falls 24% in 2019

Steam rises from the brown coal-fired power plant Weissweiler operated by RWE in Eschweiler, 21 January 2020. [EPA-EFE/SASCHA STEINBACH]

Global warming emissions from the power sector fell by 12% last year, led by a steep decline in coal power generation, which was replaced half by natural gas and half by renewables, according to fresh data published on Wednesday (5 February).

The power sector’s CO2 emissions declined at record speed in 2019 – by 12% or 120 million tonnes, according to climate think tanks Agora Energiewende and Sandbag.

Hard coal and lignite-fired power generation fell in every EU country – and by 24% overall – according to fresh data on European power sector emissions, covering all EU member states, including the UK.

The drop was sharper in 2019 than in any year since at least 1990, and could be attributed chiefly to Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, the UK, and Italy, which together accounted for 80% of coal power decline, the two think tanks said.

“If you look at Western Europe, 70% of all coal plants will have been phased out in the next five years,” said Kristian Ruby, secretary-general of Eurelectric, a trade association.

“By the end of the 2020s, coal will remain in place only in a minority of markets such as Germany, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Czechia and Slovenia,” Ruby told EURACTIV

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Converting coal plants to biomass would decimate forests, scientists warn

Biomass Pellets from India – White coal. Author: Kapilbutani [(CC BY-SA 3.0)]

Plans to shift Europe’s coal plants to burning wood pellets instead could accelerate rather than combat the climate crisis and lay waste to woodland equal to half the size of Germany’s Black Forest a year, according to campaigners.

The climate thinktank Sandbag said the heavily subsidised plans to cut carbon emissions would result in a “staggering” amount of tree cutting, potentially destroying forests faster than they can regrow.

Sandbag found that Europe’s planned biomass conversion projects would require 36m tonnes of wood pellets every year, equal to the entire current global wood pellet production. This would require forests covering 2,700 sq km to be cut down annually, the equivalent of half the Black Forest in Germany.

The majority of wood pellets are imported from the US and Canada, “meaning that there’s a huge added environmental cost in transporting the wood from the other side of the Atlantic”, said the report’s author, Charles Moore.

The planned biomass conversions – with Finland, Germany and the Netherlands leading the way – would emit 67m tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere, which would be unlikely to be reabsorbed by growing trees over the timescales relevant to meeting the targets set by Paris climate agreement, warned Sandbag.

In return, the forest-hungry power plants would produce less than 2% of the EU’s electricity needs – the same generation capacity built in Europe every year by wind and solar farm developers.

“It’s impossible to believe coal companies when they argue that the switch to burning forests could be good for the climate,” Moore said. MORE

 

This is HUGE! Europe’s leaders are about to decide whether to END carbon pollution completely

Decarbonisation is also an opportunity for industry, say MEPs© AP Images/European Union-EP

This is HUGE — Europe’s leaders are about to decide whether to END carbon pollution completely! But dirty energy blockers like Poland are trying to derail the plan. Let’s show governments there’s massive public support for 100% clean energy to tackle the climate crisis — add your name now and share widely!

SIGN THE PETITION

If they do it, it would be a giant leap towards a safe climate for all. But dirty energy blockers, like Poland, are already trying to derail the plan — and it’s up to us to defend it.

We urgently need a massive show of public support from the whole world for the plan — so let’s build one, and we’ll deliver it to all the key governments before EU leaders meet in days. Add your name now to join the call for 100% clean energy to meet the climate emergency!

Europe: End climate pollution!

Can you imagine how big a deal it would be if an entire continent announced a plan to abandon the filthy fossil fuels that are choking our skies with carbon? It could really happen — and soon!

Under the Paris climate deal, countries are required to develop new plans for rapidly reducing carbon emissions. The EU’s will be one of the first plans to be published — and experts say it will set the tone for other plans all over the world.

So let’s throw the whole weight of our magical movement behind this amazing idea. We’ll deliver our voices to all the governments ahead of the talks, and pressure blockers like Poland to back down. Join now, and let’s make this the end for dirty climate pollution!

Europe: End climate pollution!

The fight for our climate is a fight for humanity’s future. And our movement has risen time and time again to fight for the safe, sustainable future that is within our grasp. Now we must do it again — to end the era of fossil fuels for good.

Europe’s Striking Climate Kids Show How to Defeat the Far Right

The scourge of climate change is the great unifying issue of our time. The time is propitious for Canadian political parties to adopt the Green Party’s suggestion to establish an inner cabinet of all parties to address the emergency facing us. Tell your MP we need all hands on deck.

Fighting climate change now polls as a top priority among European voters—while most far-right leaders are climate denialists.

German students use a carnival float depicting environmental activist Greta Thunberg during a school strike to demand action on climate change on March 15, 2019. (Reuters / Wolfgang Rattay)

For years, European politicos and others committed to the idea of a united Europe have pined for a popular, all-Europe project that stands for the best intentions of, and the imperative for, the European project. In order to counter the EU’s distant, bureaucratic image—and the blunt the attacks of right-wing Euroskeptics—EU officials have turned to issues that touch almost all Europeans, from digital rights to consumer protection to telecommunications.

But none of these worthy endeavors, among others, have fired the passions of the average European, much less young Europeans.

But now, on the eve of the landmark May 23–26 European Parliament election, such a cause—complete with hundreds of thousands of energized participants—is banging at the EU’s door. Although the striking high schoolers of Fridays for Future (FFF) is not just a European movement but a global one, the students of Europe have found common cause with one another in a campaign demanding tangible political action from the EU to address climate change.

Perhaps unwittingly, the kids have revealed a new raison d’être for the EU beyond the postwar remits of peace and prosperity. As the young people insist, the supranational EU can and must devote itself to leading the global battle to arrest rising temperatures and seas if we expect to slow global warming.

In an open letter to the EU earlier this month, an international group of FFF activists wrote that the EU “holds enormous responsibility, not just for our future, but also for the life of billions of people across the world. Accept this responsibility. Make climate the priority.”

For the EU, the scourge of climate change could be just the ticket to rejuvenate it. On the one hand, it is our age’s most urgent issue. On the other, it is one that the surging far-right parties don’t even pretend to have answers to. When Europe’s radical nationalists deny climate change, as most do, they side with less than 5 percent of Europeans in the EU’s most populous countries. (In Germany, the hard-right Alternative for Germany calls man-made climate change “heresy” and wants to halt the clean-energy transition, and the Brexit Party’s front man, Nigel Farage, ridicules the link between rising temperatures and greenhouse gases.) The national populists have committed a huge blunder—and Europe’s democratic parties should pounce on it by making the kids’ campaign their own. MORE

Take Action! Prevent rich countries and giant corporations from dumping their plastic waste on poor communities.

Take Action! We need the EU and more than 100 national governments to win this fight.

In early May, governments around the world will meet in Switzerland for a vote on international rules to help force wealthy states and corporations to stop treating developing countries like dumps for their plastic rubbish.

In the past two decades, businesses in the EU, US, Japan, Mexico and Canada have been exporting millions of tonnes of plastic waste overseas. That’s how European and North American plastic ends up choking the rivers and coasts of countries like Malaysia, Vietnam and Thailand.

Together, we can fight that plastic flood and environmental racism — but we need a majority of governments to back the proposal.

You know how this works. If we show governments that this vote has massive public support, we can overcome the plastic industry lobbyists and polluters.

Sign the petition to governments around the world to vote for this game-changing proposal to update international law, and to minimise marine pollution and international dumping of plastic waste.