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Coal bust may be behind stall in carbon emissions

THE link between economic growth and rising greenhouse gas emissions may have finally been broken. Last week, we learned that carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels failed to rise in 2014 – the first time that has happened without an economic downturn. Now we know why.

Although coal plant construction tripled globally after 2005, that boom is turning to bust. An analysis by CoalSwarm, a think tank supported by the Sierra Club and other US NGOs, has found that since 2010 hundreds of coal plant projects worldwide have been shelved or cancelled – with two abandoned for every one completed.

The amount of coal-fired power generating capacity is still increasing, but the rate of increase is down from a peak of 6.9 per cent to 2.7 per cent in 2013. "We don't have final numbers yet, but it looks like in 2014 growth in wind power capacity exceeded that in coal," says CoalSwarm's director Ted Nace. "The slowdown in CO2 is largely caused by a slowdown in power being generated by coal."

In 2014, the world's energy industries emitted 32.3 billion tonnes of CO2 , exactly the same as 2013, according to preliminary figures cited by the International Energy Agency. This was despite an expansion of more than 3 per cent in the global economy. "For the first time, greenhouse gas emissions are decoupling from economic growth," said the IEA's chief economist Fatih Birol. Such claims have been made before, notably after 2012, when emissions rose only 1.4 per cent against economic growth of 3.2 per cent. The decoupling faltered in 2013, when emissions rose by 2.5 per cent, close to economic growth of 2.9 per cent.

source: http://www.newscientist.com