Coal cutoff
Coal and the climate crisis
Greenhouse gases are rising fast in the atmosphere, and fossil-fuel burning is responsible for most of that. The gases trap heat, stoking increasingly intense global warming and ever more ruinous climatic extremes: a lethal threat to ecosystems and economies that amplifies the longer we delay cutting emissions deeply. (And even after we cut emissions down to zero, there is a lag in the response of the climate system). Of the three fossil fuels, coal is the worst problem, because there is much more of it than there is oil and gas, and it warms the earth more per tonne burnt than oil and gas do.
The cruel arithmetic of carbon
This clip comes from Crude, the ABC film made in 2007. In it, I explain the amount of carbon that – if burned – would tip the climate beyond a danger threshold unacceptable to most governments, as the science was understood at the time of the fourth Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) scientific assessment in 2007. Today, many IPCC scientists would put the danger threshold figure lower than the 400 billion tonnes of carbon I cite in the clip, because since that report was published, research has suggested the climate is even more sensitive to greenhouse warming than was thought at the time. For those wanting to track down the cutting-edge science, the latest conclusions of leading IPCC scientists have recently been published in Nature magazine.
The line in the sand
We have to leave the vast majority of remaining coal underground, unused. Either that, or we have to find a way to keep the vast majority of the carbon dioxide produced by burning coal out of the atmosphere using carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology. But many scientists doubt that can be done more cheaply than saving the energy produced by coal, or generating the same energy from renewables. And even if it could, they doubt whether it can be done at an industrial scale in time to make a difference. This is why the campaign to stop the construction of the Kingsnorth power station is so important.
