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Coal power plant in South Africa (archive image)
Photo: Kim Ludbrook / dpa
The morning began with bad news for the delegates at the UN climate conference in Glasgow.
Global CO2 emissions are likely to reach a new historical high in 2022, warns the Global Carbon Project in a new analysis.
Above all, coal-fired power plants would already emit almost as much carbon dioxide as before the economic slump in the corona crisis.
The news that will be officially announced in Glasgow during the day is all the more important: The governments of dozens of countries are committed to phase out coal power, by far the largest global source of CO2, for the first time.
These include countries such as Poland, Vietnam, Egypt, Chile and Morocco, announced the British government.
You sign the so-called coal-to-clean statement.
This increases the number of countries that want to end coal-fired power generation in the long term to 190. Rich countries are supposed to shut down the last power plants in the 2030s, while poorer ones have a decade longer.
This requires an early end to investments in new power plants and an accelerated expansion of renewable energies such as solar and wind power.
Ukraine wants to get out by 2035
"The exit from coal is essential in order to achieve our climate goals," said the acting Federal Environment Minister Svenja Schulze (SPD).
"In order to achieve this goal, we have to support the affected regions in creating sustainable new jobs." In developing countries in particular, many jobs often depend on coal-fired power.
In addition to the coal-to-clean statement, today's Energy Day will focus on other initiatives and alliances to phase out coal.
For example, 28 countries are joining the Powering Past Coal Alliance, in which 150 countries, cities, regions and companies have come together to work together on phasing out coal.
New here is the Ukraine, which, after Poland and Germany, operates the largest number of coal-fired power plants in Europe and plans to exit by 2035.
Estonia, Slovenia, Morocco, Mauritius and Singapore also join the coalition.
"COP26 will mark 2021 as the year in which the increase in global coal demand came to an end," said the former Polish Environment Minister and President of the 19th UN Climate Change Conference, Marcin Korolec.
In order to increase the chances of still achieving the goals of the Paris climate agreement and to limit global warming to well below two degrees, the transition from coal power to clean energies must take place four to six times faster than before, said the British presidency of the climate conference in Glasgow with.
Bonuses for the shutdown of power plants
The focus is now primarily on poorer countries in Asia and Africa, which are dependent on coal and often also plan to build new power plants.
They are to receive more financial support in the future in order to be able to accelerate the energy transition.
South Africa, for example, where 90 percent of its electricity is produced with coal, receives $ 8.5 billion for the expansion of green electricity systems.
The Asian development bank ADB is helping Indonesia and the Philippines to switch off coal-fired power plants earlier with bonuses.
Large coal financiers such as China, Japan and South Korea had already announced an end to new construction abroad.
"The past few days have shown that the momentum away from coal has accelerated in Glasgow and the mechanisms and money are in place to make it obsolete," said Leo Roberts of the E3G climate think tank.
"The different initiatives are more than the sum of their parts." The era of new power plants is over, now it is a matter of shutting down old ones.
What is the traffic light coalition doing?
The Glasgow agreements also have an impact on Germany, which so far does not officially intend to phase out coal until 2038.
The traffic light coalition has so far committed to an earlier exit, but this should only "ideally" take place by 2030, as stated in the exploratory paper of the SPD, FDP and the Greens.
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