With blistering speed, the rich countries that built their wealth on coal-powered industrialization are turning their backs on dirty energy.
Coal consumption in the UK, the cradle of the Industrial Revolution, fell last year to less than 10 percent of its levels a decade earlier, and dropped by nearly one-third year-on-year in January and February, government data showed. At one point last month, fossil power as a whole dipped as low as 2.4 percent of electricity generation in the UK, the news site Carbon Brief said.
In the US, coal usage fell 17 percent last year, and is expected to drop another 12 percent by next year. In the EU, the slump in coal power generation last year was 26 percent.
Illustration: Yusha
There is one notable exception to that brightening picture: Japan.
That is making the country increasingly isolated among wealthy democracies. Ministers at the G7 meeting in Turin, Italy, last week promised to phase out coal generation by 2035, a target that might have seemed fantastical a decade ago, but now appears well within reach almost everywhere.
Japan was only able to sign onto the statement with a “dog-ate-my-homework” strategy, depending on weasel words to cover up for the absence of any serious strategy to wean itself off solid fuel.
Previously, the G7’s statements had only made vague gestures toward a “predominantly decarbonized power sector by 2035,” placing no hard deadlines on a coal phaseout. As cheaper renewables (and, in the US, gas) have driven more and more soot from the power mix, ambitions have risen.
The UK is to switch off its last coal generator in October and France’s final two plants are to power down about the same time. Italy is to follow suit next year, while Canada’s target is for 2030. Germany is legally required to close coal by 2038, but is hoping to bring that date forward to 2030. The US last week published new rules requiring any plants that hope to be operating in 2039 to be capturing 90 percent of their emissions by 2032, a death knell for remaining stations.
The situation is different for Japan which, far from closing down coal plants, is still opening them.
In Yokosuka, south of Tokyo, the country’s biggest power producer JERA Co has opened two 650 megawatt units since June last year. In Matsushima, near Nagasaki, Electric Power Development Co is later this year to start work refitting one of its plants to operate using gasified coal, a technology that promises only marginal emissions reductions.
Under the country’s strategic energy plan, coal would still account for about 19 percent of generation in 2030 — producing emissions about equivalent to those from Argentina, the Philippines or the whole of West Africa. That is likely to be a significant underestimate of the actual figure, as it depends on heroic assumptions about Tokyo’s ability to restart nuclear generators shuttered after the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, as well as breakneck growth in wind, solar, hydro and geothermal power.
Japan managed to sign on to the G7 statement using the most transparent of fictions. The promise is only to phase out “unabated generation,” an ill-defined term that Tokyo is trying to drive an 80,000 tonne coal ship through the middle of.
Abatement technologies are those that reduce power plant emissions by more than 90 percent, according to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, although that definition cannot be found in the dictionary. The quixotic strategies being explored by Japan — coal gasification and co-firing of ammonia and hydrogen in thermal generators — are unlikely to achieve more than about 20 percent savings, and have never been tested on a commercial scale.
When Japan is serious about its energy policy, it makes firm plans — as with its recent push for liquefied natural gas importers to sign decades-long supply deals. The absence of such contracts commensurate with its purported carbon storage and hydrogen procurement needs exposes its fig leaf of a coal phaseout policy.
That is a failure not just in climate terms, but in terms of basic security and economics. At a time when a weakening yen is pushing up the cost of living and sparking speculation that the government is intervening in currency markets, fossil fuels still amount to between one-quarter and one-third of the total import bill.
Japan’s dependence on imported oil, gas and coal has been a pressing national concern for more than a century, one the government still tracks by analysis of the country’s meager energy self-sufficiency ratio. With Asian nations teetering on the edge of maritime clashes in the waters through which close to 85 percent of Japan’s power supply travels, it is more of a risk than ever.
Even Australia is heading toward a 2038 coal phaseout. When that happens, Japan would find itself — alongside its neighbors Taiwan and South Korea — as one of the only rich countries still burning the dirtiest fuel. That commitment is impoverishing its people, risking its security and damaging the climate. It is not too late to change course.
David Fickling is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering climate change and energy. Previously, he worked for Bloomberg News, the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times. This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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