The good news does not come from the negotiating rooms in Glasgow, it comes from the printer: Explanations, prepared over months, are now punctually allowing a completely new spirit to waft through the corridors of the conference: The world is saying goodbye to coal, oil and gas.
More than 40 states, for example, backed a statement on Thursday saying goodbye to coal. They no longer want to invest in new coal-fired power plants and gradually shut down their old kilns. The signatories include countries that have so far been on your toes with coal: Poland, Ukraine, Indonesia, Vietnam and South Korea. The signatories admit that they understand “the imperative of urgently promoting the spread of clean energy.” It’s another interim success for the UK, and it’s not even supposed to be the only one on this day. “Coal is no longer king,” said Alok Sharma, President of the Climate Change Conference. “The end is in sight.”
This end has been looming for a long time. According to figures from the British government, 76 percent of the planned coal projects have been put aside since the Paris Agreement was passed. But when countries like Poland, Vietnam or Indonesia seal their departure from coal, it has a quality of its own. “It really looks like we have this point of no return exceeded, “says Leo Roberts, coal expert at the European think tank E3G.” This could really be the conference that heralds the end of coal. “
No more loans for coal-fired power plants
In the 1930s, the declaration said, the industrialized countries among the signatories wanted to get out of coal, and in the 1940s the developing countries too. Indonesia makes this step dependent on the country receiving more help in switching to clean energies. And anyway, this explanation is not that precise about the shutdown dates. If you turn up a little later: it doesn’t matter. But measured against the fact that a country like Poland held a coal conference eight years ago parallel to the climate summit, this declaration is a huge step forward. In Vietnam alone, a good 50 coal-fired power plants are currently being built or planned. “Indonesia’s signal that you can get out as early as 2040 is a major step forward,” says Helen Mountford of the Washington World Resources Institute. However, a number of important countries are also missing: China, for example, India or the USA.
But they had at least promised at the weekend not to put any more money into the financing of new coal-fired power plants abroad – which could also affect many of the planned projects in Southeast Asia. At the G20 summit in Rome, the 20 large industrialized and emerging countries agreed to stop funding from the end of the year.
But here, too, Glasgow goes one better. Because on Thursday, too, a declaration was made known in which almost two dozen countries pledge not only to stop loans for coal projects abroad, but also for the promotion of oil and gas projects from 2023. Great Britain announced such an exit a year ago, and the USA, Canada, Switzerland and Denmark are now following suit. Italy, co-host of the Glasgow conference, had also backed the statement at the last minute. Germany could not bring herself to do it.
According to figures from the Friends of the Earth environmental movement, the G-20 countries alone have recently invested almost 55 billion euros in public funds annually in fossil fuel projects, be it through export credits or development banks. “Last year around that time, I never expected that we would see a move like this,” says Kate DeAngelis, financial expert with the American environmental group. Now other countries like Japan and Korea would have to follow quickly.
On Tuesday, the US and the EU presented an initiative on fossil energy at the conference: to reduce methane emissions. More than 100 countries undertake to reduce the emission of this highly effective greenhouse gas by 30 percent by 2030, measured against 2020. By 2050, global warming can be dampened by 0.2 degrees Celsius. If you add to the commitments that countries have made so far, global warming compared to pre-industrial times can be limited to 1.8 degrees Celsius, the International Energy Agency calculates. But this will only succeed if the beautiful explanations are worth the printer’s ink.