Global demand for coal increased after the world’s largest countries entered into the Paris climate [accord] in 2015, according to an International Energy Agency report published Tuesday.
Demand for coal jumped 1.1% in 2018, continuing an increase that began two years after the United States and other world powers forged an agreement to reduce carbon emissions, the IEA noted in its 2019 coal report.
Coal generation dipped in 2019 but is likely to remain steady, the report added.
Asia consumed roughly 73% of the 8.5 billion tons of coal consumed worldwide in 2018. World consumption was about seven billion tons in 2015, according to the Energy Information Administration.
EIA uses a different method than the IEA to compile coal consumption, leaving a discrepancy in the amount of coal consumed over the past five years.
“Expectations of an imminent coal collapse have come and gone before,” IEA noted in its report. “A similar upsurge is not expected in today’s context, but neither is a sudden plunge,” the agency added, referring to statistics showing global coal consumption ticked upward 65% worldwide since 2000.
China, India and other Asian countries are largely responsible for the uptick, even as coal production dipped in the U.S. and Europe.
Coal trade grew by 4% in 2018, surpassing 1.4 billion tons, and coal production jumped by 3.3% that same year, according to the IEA.
Former President Barack Obama signed the Paris agreement in 2015 and enacted the Clean Power Plan (CPP), which required states to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 2022 and encouraged states to close and replace facilities with natural gas.
The Paris deal was forged when coal demand was entering the middle of a three-year decline, IEA noted in its 2019 report.
The CPP was expected to force more coal power plants and mines to close down, costing thousands of jobs in the process.
Nearly 40% of coal-fired power capacity has been retired or announced plans to retired as a result of market forces, technological change and an increase in regulations, according to some experts. Trump promised to end what conservatives say was Obama’s “war on coal.”
Things have not gone as expected for Trump. More than 50 American coal producers have shuttered since voters elected the president in 2016 on a promise to rescue the industry.
One victim was Robert Murray, a billionaire Trump backer who saw one of his coal companies go bankrupt in October.
Murray contributed $1 million to a Trump super political action committee and donated another $300,000 to the president’s inauguration, according to FEC filings.
He’s also been at the forefront of efforts to poke and prod Trump into crafting policies designed to prop up the fledgling coal industry.
Natural gas and other forms of green energy have taken their toll on big coal, but coal is still an important energy mixture.
The U.S. got 27% of its power from coal plants in 2018, despite mining jobs declining in recent years, according to federal data.
Coal power generation and mining employed 160,119 American workers in 2016, the Energy Department reported.
Read more at Daily Caller
The market should decide if coal use increases or decreases. But to do that start with removing the large subsidies for the so-called renewable energy, wind and solar, as well as the bio-fuels (ethanol and bio-diesel).
The world needs coal we can not allowed a bunch of Eco-Freak idiots from Greenpeace or the Just Stinks Rebellion prevent and block coal shipments over this Global Warming/Climate Change nonsense
Because coal has the highest heat content of any fuel.
To limit it is to create energy poverty for those most desperate for energy. This is simply ENERGY IMPERIALISM.
Eco activists are prejudiced at their core.
If renewables really were the promised panacea , coal would stay in the ground. Truth is, humanity’s energy demand has outpaced the proliferation of wind turbines and solar farms. They can’t keep up. Sadly, it will be the lack of energy that keeps our population down. Not food, not water, not space, nor oxygen. That is why the big brains behind One World governance have bedevilled fossil fuels and its byproduct, CO2. The Elites hate the masses.
If a climate activist were to read this they would claiming a large error. The article called natural gas “green energy.” Natural gas if a fossil fuel, however, for those who believe in the fraud that CO2 is harmful, calling natural gas “green” is not that far off. Fossil fuels provide energy by burning hydrogen and carbon. More energy comes from burning the hydrogen than the carbon. Natural gas has the highest ratio of hydrogen to carbon, 4:1. Coal on the other hand no hydrogen except for a small amount of contaminants, so burning coal produces the most CO2 per unit of energy.
The main point of the article is despite the Paris Treaty the world of coal is increasing world wide. This shows just how ineffective this treaty and other agreements are.
So comforting that you stand up for the truth.