The United States, Czech Republic, Cyprus, Dominican Republic, Iceland, Kosovo and Norway have announced at COP28 their accession to the global alliance to abandon coal-fired electricity generation. Analysts hope that this could be one more signal that can encourage disinvestment in this fossil fuel.
The US special climate envoy, John Kerry, defended the need to “gradually” abandon coal at the UN climate summit in Dubai.
The United States announcement has, however, two nuances, two buts. The total closure of the plants in operation is delayed until 2035 and the exceptions are those plants that have carbon capture and storage systems, that is, that manage to avoid carbon emissions (in English the term unabated is used: without reduction of emissions).
Kerry urged the world to join the North American country and join the Powering Past Coal Alliance - of which Spain has been a part since 2021 and in which 80% of OECD countries are already included - and stressed that "The first step is to stop aggravating the problem: stop the construction of new coal plants."
The US has the third country with the highest installed power capacity of coal plants in operation, only behind China and India, although in the last decade, the North American country has not built any new plants and is on its way to close more than half of its plants.
Analysts from different organizations, such as Climate Analytics, Solutions for Our Climate or Third Generation Environmentalism (E3G), applauded the news, and assured a group of journalists present at COP28 that the fact that the US has joined the initiative may encourage other countries such as Korea, Japan, India or China to also commit.
"The US is a big consumer of coal, it has plants totaling 200 gigawatts, so this is hugely symbolic, not only in terms of emissions, but also because the US is stepping up on the international stage and saying that they are going to abandon coal on a path to stop warming at 1.5ºC," celebrated Leo Roberts, energy transition specialist at E3G.
The head of climate diplomacy at the Solutions for Our Climate organization, Vivian Sunwoo Lee, also appreciated that the US is "taking the reins and sending a very clear message that economies must move away from coal", something especially important in its native Korea, where "it must also be progressively eliminated and have a clear date for accelerating the exit from coal."
Korea announced in April that it would no longer continue financing these plants abroad with public funds in April, and Japan, at the G7 meeting, committed to the same, the expert highlighted. And China did the same at the UN General Assembly in September.
All of this reflects a marked trend in the market, and that is that the more invested in coal, the more stranded assets there will be. The US step forward reinforces that trend and sends the message that investing in new coal generation will mean a decline in the economy.
However, experts also criticized the fact that the date that the United States has set as the deadline to completely abandon coal is 2035, since "it does not allow progress at the speed necessary to meet the Paris objectives," the goals that the countries assumed. in 2015 so that global warming does not exceed 1.5ºC or 2ºC above pre-industrial levels.
The climate scientist and director of Climate Analytics, Bill Hare, criticized for his part that the US commitment is to leave behind coal that does not have CO2 capture and storage systems, when "in the most recent IPCC assessment "It's pretty clear that what we need is not unabated coal, but coal left out."
Capturing and storing CO2 is "too expensive" for coal-fired power generation, he said, and also poses "big environmental problems."
