Special climate envoy John Kerry has announced the Biden administration’s latest climate pledge—to stop building new coal plants and shut down existing ones.
The United States has “proudly” committed to not build any new coal-fired power plants and to get rid of existing ones entirely, John Kerry, special presidential envoy on climate matters, said on Dec. 2.
“To meet our goal of 100 percent carbon pollution-free electricity by 2035, we need to phase out unabated coal,” he said in a statement, in which he announced at the annual United Nations COP28 climate change summit in Dubai, United Arab Emirates that the United States had officially joined a coalition of 56 other countries who all plan to ditch coal in the name of climate change.
“We will be working to accelerate unabated coal phase-out across the world, building stronger economies and more resilient communities. The first step is to stop making the problem worse: stop building new unabated coal power plants.”
While no specific date was given for when the Biden administration plans to nix existing U.S. coal plants, other regulatory actions by the administration zero in on 2035 as the year when coal ends.
Just below 20 percent of U.S. electricity was powered by coal as of October, according to the Department of Energy (DOE).
Anti-Coal Alliance
The anti-coal commitment that Mr. Kerry said Washington had just joined is called the Power Past Coal Alliance, which was started six years ago and had 50 members until Dec. 3, when the United States, Czech Republic, Cyprus, Dominican Republic, Iceland, Kosovo, and Norway joined, bringing the total to 56.
Citing the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) Net Zero Roadmap, the Power Past Coal Alliance said in a Dec. 2 statement that, in order to “keep the 1.5°C goal within reach,” advanced economies such as the United States need to immediately end the construction of new coal power plants and phase out existing plants by 2030 and by 2040 in the rest of the world.
The goal, first established in the Paris Agreement in 2015, aims to limit the global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2100.
By Tom Ozimek
