Though Indian 🇮🇳 PM Modi has promised to rapidly build out #solar & #wind generation to replace polluting #FossilFuels, his administration hasn’t been able to keep up with demand, giving a second life to old, inefficient #coal plants 🏭 https://buff.ly/4d14b8k
Bloomberg: German coal mines emit much more methane than reported, study says. The nation has committed to helping slash global methane emissions 30% by the end of this decade.
"Justice Kent Teskey warned the province that courts take a dim view of delay being used to neuter public attempts to understand how important decisions are made.
'The requesting parties have been practically denied access to the information they are entitled to at law and this court will not abet this conduct through the availability of judicial review,' he wrote in a judgment released Friday."
For those of you who (rightly) think that a key element in the world's response to climate change would be the retiring of coal-fired energy capacity & the halt to new building of plant will be concerned by the current record on both.
While we fret (rightly) about oil & gas, we shouldn't forget that coal continues to be a major problem.
Once again our political leaders are making pious pronouncements, but doing too little for a green transition!
"About 69.5 gigawatts (GW) of #coal plant capacity came online last year, of which two-thirds were built in China, according to the report. There were also plants built in Indonesia, India, Vietnam, Japan, Bangladesh, Pakistan, South Korea, Greece and Zimbabwe.
Meanwhile, a slowdown in coal plant shutdowns in the US and Europe led to more than 21GW retiring last year.
The net annual increase is almost 48.5GW for the year, the highest since 2016."
#Coal plants have been migrating, generally from the developed world where they're now being shut down, to developing countries who also want to develop. Even though rich countries have already depleted the #CarbonBudget.
You can see the migration on this beautifully designed interactive map, covering 2000 - 2020.
(Well before this time span, coal plants were only found in Europe, then in North America).
#CarbonMajors is a database of historic production data from 122 of the world’s largest oil, gas, coal, and cement producers.
• Investor-owned companies account for 31% of emissions, with Chevron, ExxonMobil, and BP the three largest contributors.
• State-owned companies are linked to 33%, with Saudi Aramco, Gazprom, and the National Iranian Oil Company being the largest contributors.
• Nation-states account for the remaining 36%.
“The #CarbonMajors database makes it dramatically easier to document, calculate, and visually demonstrate the growing chasm between the urgent demands of climate reality and the continued reckless and intentional growth of oil and gas production,” said Carroll Muffet, President and CEO of the Center for International Environmental Law #CIEL.
World’s coal power capacity rises despite climate warnings
A report by Global #Energy Monitor found that coal power capacity grew by 2% last year, driven by an increase in new #coal plants across #China and a slowdown of plant closures in #Europe and the #US.
"A mere 57 oil, gas, coal and #cement producers are directly linked to 80% of the world’s greenhouse gas #emissions since the 2016 Paris climate agreement, a study has shown.
This powerful cohort of state-controlled corporations and shareholder-owned multinationals are the leading drivers of the #climate crisis
The most striking trend, however, was the surging growth of emissions related to state and state-owned producers, particularly in the Asian #coal sector."
Today in Labor History April 2, 1840: Émile Zola, French novelist, playwright, journalist was born. He was also a liberal activist, playing a significant role in the political liberalization of France, and in the exoneration of Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish army officer falsely convicted and imprisoned on trumped up, antisemitic charges of espionage. He was also a significant influence on mid-20th century journalist-authors, like Thom Wolfe, Truman Capote, Hunter S. Thompson, Norman Mailer and Joan Didion. Wolfe said that his goal in writing fiction was to document contemporary society in the tradition of Steinbeck, Dickens, and Zola.
Zola wrote dozens of novels, but his most famous, Germinal, about a violently repressed coalminers’ strike, is one of the greatest books ever written about working class rebellion. It had a huge influence on future radicals, especially anarchists. Some anarchists named their children Germinal. Rudolf Rocker had a Yiddish-language anarchist journal in London called Germinal, in the 1910s. There were also anarchist papers called Germinal in Mexico and Brazil in the 1910s.
A coal block, unlocked for mining after industry lobbying, awarded to Adani Group
Coal ministry over-rode environment ministry and its mining experts to do away with ban on mining the block nestled in the densest forests of Madhya Pradesh.
"#WestVirginia Gov. Jim Justice (R) on Tuesday vetoed a measure that would raise the allowable size for a #olar plant operated by state utilities, citing concerns about its effects on the #coal industry."
He says he does this to "protect" voters from rising energy prices -- while hoping voters don't know that it's now a lot cheaper to build new solar than to keep a coal plant going.