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No country will be truly coal-free until they are a net energy exporter and they do not import any goods that use coal-based energy in their supply chain. Europ

• rwmj 7mo ago
  It's more nuanced than that. This article is about the US (a worse polluter than Ireland), but it shows only about a small difference because of offshoring emissions: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/no-the-us-didnt-outsource-our-carbon https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/no-the-us-didnt-outsource-our-...
  • mrits 7mo ago
    What is the point of comparing the US to Ireland? Perhaps compare it to something like the state of Oklahoma.
  • petcat 7mo ago
    It's even more nuanced than that because the United States is made up of many different states, with many different energy policies. Ireland would most closely equate to the state of Massachusetts by population and economic size, and Massachusetts shut down its last coal plant almost a decade ago.
  • zahlman 7mo ago
    I don't know if I buy this argument. If the US sends oil to another country, which burns it for energy, produces a finished good and exports that back to the US, then the CO2 released isn't accounted for in production-based numbers. But it seems to me like it isn't really properly accounted for in the consumption-based numbers that Noah is holding up, because those are effectively giving the US a credit for exporting the oil in the first place that offsets the imported good. As he says, the US's exports are carbon-intensive and that largely explains the difference being so small. Noah also tries to refute the perception that manufacturing is in decline in the US, but he doesn't adjust per-capita and doesn't account for the obvious fact that major US exports are looking more and more like raw materials and less like finished goods, while imports are the other way around. Aircraft and ICs used to compete for top spot on the US export list. Since 2008 it's petroleum and oil.
• bananzamba 7mo ago
  Air quality will improve, just not CO2
  • ceejayoz 7mo ago
    Somehow that’s an often missed aspect of this. Yeah, ditching coal has a wide array of nice side effects. It has killed many, many more than the world’s nuclear accidents.
    • nixass 7mo ago
      Coal probably kills more people in a single day than all nuclear accidents ever combined
      • wolvoleo 7mo ago
        Probably but damage from nuclear accidents isn't only measured in deaths. No coal plant accident has caused an exclusion zone for 40 years.
        • woodruffw 7mo ago
          I think that depends on where you draw the line around the term "coal plant." There have been plenty of coal ash disasters that result in years of exclusion (for purposes of habitation, drinking water, fishing, etc.)[1][2][3][4] [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly_ash_slurry_spill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_Creek_flood https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_Creek_flood [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_County_coal_slurry_spill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_County_coal_slurry_spil... [4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_County_water_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_County_water_crisis
        • brynnbee 7mo ago
          If you look at net damage to the planet, fossil fuel burning energy sources kill literally 8 million+ people a year. Coal plants are vastly more radioactive than nuclear plants, and the effects of burning coal will have a vastly outsized share of damage to the planet in the long than nuclear. Its effects are just less concentrated to a single area.
• aurareturn 7mo ago
  I agree. Whenever numbers show that China is the largest CO2 polluter currently, it needs to be mentioned that China manufactures much of the world's physical goods.
  • cogman10 7mo ago
    China's CO2 emissions have been falling for the last 2 years, even as they've increased their manufacturing capacity. https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-co2-emissions-have-now-been-flat-or-falling-for-21-months/ https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-co2-emissions-ha...
    • aurareturn 7mo ago
      I wonder if on-shorting manufacturing would mean a higher increase in CO2 because China is leading the world in green energy creation.
    • 21asdffdsa12 7mo ago
      https://globalenergymonitor.org/projects/global-coal-plant-tracker/tracker/ https://globalenergymonitor.org/projects/global-coal-plant-t... They have more coal power plants planned and your data hickup worked out during recensions and covid.
      • triceratops 7mo ago
        In 2024, well after Covid, 88% of new electric capacity added in China came from renewables. https://www.eia.gov/international/analysis/country/chn https://www.eia.gov/international/analysis/country/chn Their existing grid uses coal because they have coal, just like the US uses gas because it has gas. And obviously as old coal plants are retired they're going to build new ones. They don't use the new plants for additional capacity. As they add more solar and storage, which they're building a lot of, they're going to absolutely crush the coal burning too. It's literally a national security issue for them.
      • jillesvangurp 7mo ago
• madaxe_again 7mo ago
  Steel is the tough one - the vast majority of new steel is produced using blast furnaces and coke. DRI is still a fringe product. I mean, the UK proudly trumpets that they're coal-free, while entertaining a new coking coal mine.
  • api 7mo ago
    Steel is also a small percentage of coal use. The vast majority of coal is used for electricity generation.
    • dgacmu 7mo ago
      Putting numbers on that (for the us) from 2022 [1]: Electric power—469.9 MMst—91.7% Industrial total—41.9 MMst—8.2% Industrial coke plants—16.0 MMst—3.1% Industrial combined heat and power—10.1 MMst—2.0% Other industrial—15.8 MMst—3.1% Commercial—0.8 MMst—0.2% Getting down to 6% of our current coal use would be amazing. So much lung cancer and asthma would be prevented. [1] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/coal/use-of-coal.php https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/coal/use-of-coal.php
      • api 7mo ago
        Replacing all coal for electricity and leaving industry alone would be a gigantic dent in carbon emissions. Just that. Even if some of that replacement is with gas it still helps. Gas emits about half the carbon per kWh.
• rsanek 7mo ago
  There are existing metrics that adjust for this. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/consumption-co2-emissions?tab=line&country=USA~OWID_EUR~CHN~IRL https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/consumption-co2-emissions...
  • aziaziazi 7mo ago
    Thank you for the link. I understand China has about twice the inhabitant of USA+EU but the same consumption based CO2, am I wrong?
• 21asdffdsa12 7mo ago
  europes coal powerplants are in china, its polution is in china, the products of china are in europe and the producers from china live in europe and the us. China even offers greenwashing as a service, so people can buy for green notes a green consciousness.
  • myrmidon 7mo ago
    > europes coal powerplants are in china, its polution is in china, the products of china are in europe and the producers from china live in europe and the us. This is generally overstated. Emissions imported or exported via trade are significantly smaller than domestic emissions for almost every country. In the EU vs China case, accounting for imported/exported emissions basically changes which of the two is doing better, but emission levels are pretty close to begin with (US is already doing significantly worse than China either way). For China, we are talking about ~1 ton/person/year from trade (in favor of China), while local emissions are at ~8 tons/person/year [1]. You make a valid point, but looking at the actual numbers it turns out that this makes (surprisingly) little difference. [1]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/imported-or-exported-co-emissions-per-capita https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/imported-or-exported-co-e...
• rowanajmarshall 7mo ago
  Europe is a gigantic manufacturer of vast quantities of goods. It has not deindustrialised at all.
• belorn 7mo ago
  The goal of net energy exporter assumes that energy produced at one time can be exchange for energy produced at an other time for the same price, and that assumption has not been true in Europe for decades. You can be a net energy exporter and still be dependent energy imports for more than 50% of the energy a country consumes, as has been demonstrated by Denmark. I will happily trade 10 unit of energy for just a single unit of energy, assuming I get to decide when I give the 10 units and when I can demand the 1 unit. A lot of profit in the European energy market can be made by such a "bad" deal. The date when a country energy grid is free from fossil fuels, like coal, is when the grid has no longer any demand during the year for producing or importing energy produced by fossil fuels.
• jqpabc123 7mo ago
  [flagged]
• macspoofing 7mo ago
  >No country will be truly coal-free Being coal-free is possible. Being fossil-fuel free is harder. Most of Irish energy comes from Natural Gas and Oil - the former is what supplanted Coal, not Wind.
  • pembrook 7mo ago
    [flagged]
    • bryanlarsen 7mo ago
      Many consider natural gas to be worse than coal due to widespread methane leakage and methane being a far more potent greenhouse gas than CO2.
      • pembrook 7mo ago
        [flagged]
        • derriz 7mo ago
          > As with any religion, environmentalism Calling something a religion is a lazy and disingenuous way to dismiss it. The effects of airborne and waterborne pollution on human health has been the focus of scientific investigation for centuries at least. Ecosystem destruction is not "a religious belief" - it's something which has been measured, carefully recorded and studied using scientific methods. > at 1/1000th the cost of re-wiring our entire energy system around renewables This is alarmist hyperbole. Renewables now account for about 35% of the global electricity generation mix. There are countless examples of countries that run grids where renewables account for more than 80% of the electricity mix. Even if you just consider wind and solar, many countries are approaching 50% penetration in the space of 20 or 25 years without "re-wiring their entire their entire energy systems". Yes NG generation is the only fossil tech still standing in terms of being able to compete at any level with modern generation tech but it is being squeezed. Batteries surpassed NG in terms of economics for peaking sometime around 2020/2021 - which is reflected by the share of new capacity investment since then. > industrializing 3B+ people using windmills A windmill is a device used to mill materials that happens to be powered by wind, like a watermill, or a pepper mill or a paper/wood/etc mill. I'm not sure what that has to do with electricity generation.
• deanc 7mo ago
  This is what matters. The whole thing is an exercise in greenwashing. It doesn't matter if you stop burning coal in your own country, if the energy you import is also made by burning oil and gas. The whole conversation about clean energy is polluted by the complete misunderstanding of the general population of how energy demands are balanced. Saying you're replacing coal and gas with wind is just nonsense. It's one solution to a bigger problem. The big problem is how to balance your grid across peaks and troughs and that requires a diverse set of clean energy solutions, with wind being one small part of it.
• pimterry 7mo ago
  Europe is less industrial than in the past, but by every measure I can find many countries (especially Germany, Poland, Slovakia, Italy) are significantly more industrialized than the US - around 1.5x to 3x as much industrial activity and employment per capita, depending on the measure. Even the very least industrialized of the major EU nations (e.g. Spain, Greece) only just drop down to match the US numbers per-capita.
  • owenversteeg 7mo ago
    The issue is very complex. First - broad generalization - Europe's surviving industry is mostly made of less critical industries. If you look at important things in the world, and the important things that make up or make those important things, a tiny fraction of that is European, and that fraction is shrinking rapidly. There are some things - there is some green manufacturing stuff going on, there is some high-precision stuff in IT/CH/DE, there is ASML and Airbus, Poland can actually make things, etc. - but where will that be in ten or twenty years? I'll tell you: the high-precision stuff is rapidly moving to Asia, the green manufacturing is not very cost effective and uses a lot of imported core technologies, the C919 is going to fly with Chinese engines soon... the list goes on. The EU badly wants to make solar panels, cutting edge chips, fighter jets, rockets et cetera - and it simply can't, not at the cutting edge. The US, on the other hand, can make all of those things. It is still behind China in manufacturing overall, but it can still make a lot of the cutting edge, and it is still innovating. Second, a lot of the EU stuff is already dead and only continues to exist through inertia. The median German cars and machine tools are worse than the median Chinese and they cost far more. Third, those numbers often reflect the nebulous concept of "value added." Let's take the case of a refrigerator. Chinese company manufactures every technical part of the refrigerator and ships it to their EU business partner for €100. EU partner assembles it, fills it with foam, and sells it for €600. Most of the "value added" was in the EU! Win for the EU! Go EU manufacturing! The concept of "value added" is the basis for the entire EU VAT system and much of its economic indicators and incentives, while in the US it is almost never mentioned. This is also the source of the most hilarious comparisons (Greek manufacturing superior to the US per capita? χαχαχα) If you want to cut through the bullshit, you have to look at actual things made. Among the US/CN/EU, who leads: Solar panels (CN), cutting edge chips (US), chipmaking equipment (EU), jet engines (US), aircraft (US), space launch vehicles (US), fighter jets (US), batteries (CN), nuclear reactors (CN), submarines (US), advanced missiles (US), cars (CN), CNC machines (CN), machine tools (CN), precision bearings and linear motion systems (CN), cutting edge medical equipment (US), gas turbines (US/EU), high voltage grid equipment (CN), telecom equipment (CN), construction equipment (US), ships (CN), advanced optics (EU), electric motors (CN), steel (CN), aluminum (CN), oil (US), cutting edge pharma (US), industrial robots (CN), wind turbines (CN), trains (CN), agricultural machinery (US/EU), drones (CN), smartphones (CN.) From that list, China leads eighteen, the US leads eleven, the EU leads two, and the EU and US are tied for two. And China is closing in fast on chipmaking. When China takes that crown, what will the EU have left?
• interludead 7mo ago
  That's true to an extent, but it also sets a bar that almost no country could meet in a globalized economy
• PaulRobinson 7mo ago
  Great example of allowing perfect to be the enemy of good. If major advanced economies are able to move their entire grid away from coal, it means the entire grid globally can move from coal. "Ah", the critics say, "but manufacturing is so much more complex!" Really? These are not countries without manufacturing. They have data centres stacked with the latest generation of Nvidia chips, electric rail, major capital cities, populations of millions... ... and of course, China agrees and is trying to move towards decarbonisation of their grid. Yes, it'll take time, but it'll take even longer if you never start.
  • munk-a 7mo ago
    Coal is so deeply irrational. Only when you plug your ears and scream can you block out comprehension of the massive local externalities that make it inefficient compared to other energy options. It is cheap to setup with minimal access to highly skilled professionals so it was a good option to bootstrap economies until recently when solar, wind and NG have become easy to access and cost competitive. It's perfectly reasonable to have a phase out timeline to avoid under utilizing paid-for infrastructure, but it is a dead technology.
• SchemaLoad 7mo ago
  Coal is essentially obsolete for energy generation. It's the most expensive and least flexible option. Even sticking with fossil fuels, natural gas is much better. It sticks around because many plants exist already, but new ones don't make sense.
• NoLinkToMe 7mo ago
  True. But: EU is the only effective player in the world that drives energy policy outside its borders, by being a massive market with regulatory power regarding its imports. If you look at three figures: energy use per capita, emissions per capita, and GDP per unit of energy/emissions, and include imported consumption, the EU's are all trending in a positive direction for many years now. So stating the EU has de-industralized and its progress on shutting down coal is therefore 'fake' and misleading because it imports its industrial consumption from other countries to which it has simply offloaded its emissions, isn't true.