<!doctype html public "-//W3C//DTD W3 HTML//EN">
<html><head><style type="text/css"><!--
blockquote, dl, ul, ol, li { padding-top: 0 ; padding-bottom: 0 }
--></style><title>Coal's role in economic growth makes it hard to
stop</title></head><body>
<div><font face="Times">PNAS Published online before print July 6,
2015, doi: 10.1073/pnas.1422722112</font><font face="Arial"><br>
---------------------------------------------------------------------<span
></span>------------------------------------------------------<br>
"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."<br>
-----------------------------------------</font></div>
<div><font face="Times" size="+1">Drivers for the renaissance of
coal</font><font face="Times"><br>
</font><font face="Arial">Jan Christoph Steckel et al<br>
<br>
</font><font face="Times">Abstract</font><font face="Arial"><br>
</font><font
face="Times"><u
>http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/07/01/1422722112.abstract</u></font
><br>
<font face="Arial"></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial">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but in the 20th century it increasingly was superseded by oil and gas.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.</font></div>
<x-sigsep><pre>--
</pre></x-sigsep>
<div><font face="Cambria"
color="#000000"
>********************************************************************<span
></span>************************<br>
"The death knell for the grizzly in the Southwest was tolled not by
a church bell but by a train whistle."<br>
<br>
"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."<br>
<br>
David E. Brown. <i> The grizzly in the southwest</i>. University
of Oklahoma Press. 1985. p. 97<br>
</font><font face="Geneva" color="#000000"><br>
</font><font face="Times New Roman" color="#000000"><br>
</font><font face="Bookman Old Style" size="-1"
color="#000000"></font></div>
</body>
</html>