[MCN] Coal's role in economic growth makes it hard to stop

[Lance Olsen]

PNAS Published online before print July 6, 2015, doi: 10.1073/pnas.1422722112
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"If future economic growth of poor countries is fueled mainly by 
coal, ambitious mitigation targets very likely will become 
infeasible. Building new coal power plant capacities will lead to 
lock-in effects for the next few decades."
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Drivers for the renaissance of coal
Jan Christoph Steckel et al

Abstract
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/07/01/1422722112.abstract

Coal was central to the industrial revolution, but in the 20th 
century it increasingly was superseded by oil and gas. However, in 
recent years coal again has become the predominant source of global 
carbon emissions. We show that this trend of rapidly increasing 
coal-based emissions is not restricted to a few individual countries 
such as China. Rather, we are witnessing a global renaissance of coal 
majorly driven by poor, fast-growing countries that increasingly rely 
on coal to satisfy their growing energy demand. The low price of coal 
relative to gas and oil has played an important role in accelerating 
coal consumption since the end of the 1990s. In this article, we show 
that in the increasingly integrated global coal market the 
availability of a domestic coal resource does not have a 
statistically significant impact on the use of coal and related 
emissions. These findings have important implications for climate 
change mitigation: If future economic growth of poor countries is 
fueled mainly by coal, ambitious mitigation targets very likely will 
become infeasible. Building new coal power plant capacities will lead 
to lock-in effects for the next few decades. If that lock-in is to be 
avoided, international climate policy must find ways to offer viable 
alternatives to coal for developing countries.
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"The death knell for the grizzly in the Southwest was tolled not by a 
church bell but by a train whistle."

"Changing economic conditions, new homesteading laws, and cheap rail 
travel resulted in an ever-increasing influx of settlers, who 
eventually penetrated to the remotest corners of the region."

David E. Brown.  The grizzly in the southwest. University of Oklahoma 
Press. 1985. p. 97


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