Waterloo Region Record

Coal fires up the agenda

Canada to push for its demise at climate talks

- Mia Rabson

OTTAWA — Climate change talks in Germany are headed for a collision course on coal this week — and Canada is right in the middle of it.

Environmen­t Minister Catherine McKenna was to arrive Sunday in Bonn, Germany, to attend the second week of COP23, the annual United Nations climate change talks that two years ago led to the Paris climate change accord.

This year, the parties to Paris are hammering out rules for how that accord will be implemente­d, how carbon will be counted and how countries will be held accountabl­e for their emissions cuts.

McKenna and her British counterpar­t, Claire Perry, minister of state for climate change and industry, want the conversati­on to focus on getting rid of coal as a power source, which is responsibl­e for more than 40 per cent of global carbon dioxide emissions.

McKenna and Perry are hosting a joint event Nov. 16 to launch a joint campaign calling for other countries to declare a plan not to build any more unabated coal-fired plants and eliminate existing ones. Unabated plants are those that have no carbon capture or storage technology to keep emissions from ending up in the atmosphere.

“We want every country to look at how they can reduce their use of coal and phase it out and we want to be supporting developing countries to do so,” McKenna told The Canadian Press in an interview last week.

About 10 per cent of electricit­y in Canada comes from coal, and 40 per cent of the electricit­y around the world is generated by coal-fired power plants. A year ago, Canada committed to eliminatin­g coal as a source of power by 2030. Britain has committed to getting rid of it by 2025.

France, Italy and Netherland­s also aim to get rid of coal power.

But their anti-coal initiative is in direct contrast with the United States, which is kicking off the week with an event promoting all the ways fossil fuels like coal can be part of the narrative of combating climate change.

“I anticipate it will be a big story this week,” said Catherine Abreu, executive director of Climate Action Network Canada, who is in Bonn.

Last month, Scott Pruitt, the head of the U.S. Environmen­tal Protection Agency, declared the “war on coal is over” as he tore up the U.S. Clean Power Plan, a legacy of president Barack Obama that required states to cut emissions and offered incentives to foster renewable power and energy efficiency.

McKenna, however, said the world has already decided with its money that coal is a relic of the past.

“The market has moved on coal so the good news is you now have clean energy like wind and solar that’s cheaper and there’s far more investment­s in wind and solar than there is in coal,” she said.

However, the Global Coal Plant Tracker shows plans are afoot for another 1,600 new coal plants, which once operationa­l would expand coal power by 42 per cent around the world.

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