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Coal Burning Is Up 50 Percent Worldwide, and It's Killing More People Than Ever

It's a nightmare scenario—we're reliant on what's killing us. And it's only been getting worse.
Image: Flickr

There's a strong case to be made that coal is humankind's thorniest problem. It's the chief source of the world's energy—it currently keeps the lights on in 40 percent of the world—and simultaneously the globe's biggest contributor to climate change. It provides cheap power, but infects and kills hundreds of thousands with respiratory illnesses.

It's a nightmare scenario—we're reliant on what's killing us. And it's only been getting worse.

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Over the last decade, during which global warming rose to prominence as a pressing international issue, coal use actually continued to grow. Worldwide, coal consumption is up 50 percent over the last decade, according to the Energy Information Administration. That's largely because, in most parts of the world, coal still seems like the least expensive way to generate electricity (I say 'seems like,' because governments and utilities seldom take into account the steep external costs of burning coal, like health care).

As of last year, China and India were building four new coal plants a week. As of now, there are still an estimated 1,200 new coal plants on the drawing board worldwide. According to a 2012 report from Peabody Energy (a major coal concern), global demand was expected to hit 8.9 billion tons a year by 2016, up from 7.9 billion. China was expected to add 160 plants by 2016, and India 46.

In India, coal burning results in an estimated 115,000 premature deaths annually (from cancer, respiratory illness, and so forth). In China, cancer is the leading cause of death—and lung cancer is the deadliest. Coal-burning has been fingered as the chief driver of those deaths.

And yet, the thirst for coal in rapidly developing countries was such that The New York Times declared "Coal's Future Seems Assured" in a headline last year. Even though bodies like the European Union were discouraging coal through climate policies, and coal use was tapering off in the US thanks to the natural gas fracking boom, climate-and-people-killing coal was guaranteed a future in the developing world.

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But that might not entirely be the case.

Last month, President Obama made a speech outlining his climate change policies. The biggest news relayed in the speech flew under the radar a bit—that his administration stop funding coal projects abroad as part of foreign-aid spending. Shortly after, the World Bank announced it too would stop backing coal projects. Then the European Investment Bank did the same. All told, $10 billion in funding for coal was taken off the table.

Just like that, the outlook for coal dimmed. A new Bloomberg report details the ways that those announcements lead to crumbling support for coal financing worldwide. Investors are increasingly leary of backing an energy source that has quickly become a sort of power non grata on the international stage. Furthermore, the writing's on the wall—climate change is so widely agreed to be a threat that investors know it's only a matter of time before carbon-curtailing policies will start hampering coal projects, even abroad.

Of course, economic giants like China and India don't need the World Bank to build coal, so projects will likely continue to come online for the immediate future. Then again, outlets like the South China Morning Post are reporting that it appears that the nation's coal consumption appears to have peaked.

We'll see. There are still innumerable hurdles to wiping coal off the map—it's still cheap, for one. For another, coal is the go-too fuel source for steel coking, which demands super-high temperatures. There's no economically viable alternative on the horizon, either. Coincidentally, places like China and India need a mammoth amount of steel, too, to build their fast-growing cities.

So we're not out of the woods yet, not even close. Stateside, coal companies are scrambling to build export terminals to ship our excess coal—our own power plants are switching to gas—to Asia. Meanwhile, absent any stronger carbon-restricting policy, coal will still creep up 33 percent on its own by 2040, according to the EIA report.

If that happens, the planet will keep frying, and millions of people will keep choking to death on pollution. Coal is literally killing us—and there are now more power plants that guzzle it down chugging along than ever before.