The Dog Ate Japan’s Plan to Phase Out Coal Power
Tokyo stands alone in the G7. Far from shutting down polluting fuel plants, it’s opening them.
Just a fig leaf.
Photographer: Tomohiro Ohsumi/Bloomberg
With blistering speed, the rich countries that built their wealth on coal-powered industrialization are turning their backs on dirty energy.
Coal consumption in the UK, the cradle of the Industrial Revolution, fell last year to less than 10% of its levels a decade earlier, and dropped by nearly a third year-on-year in January and February, according to government data. At one point last month, fossil power as a whole dipped as low as 2.4% of electricity generation in Britain, the news site Carbon Brief noted. In the US, coal usage fell 17% during 2023, and will drop another 12% by 2025. In the European Union, the slump in coal power generation last year came to 26%.