Can the war on coal still be won?

Next Upcoming Virtual Regional Blueprints for America's Clean Energy Future Brought to you by Intersolar & Energy Storage North America (IESNA) . By Canary Media Ten years ago, I embedded in the war on coal. I spent a month inside the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign , watching an organization renowned for tree-hugging, grassroots activism use boring legal and economic strategies to shut down coal-fired power plants in red and blue states. In the Politico Magazine article I subsequently wrote, I called the effort ​“the most extensive, expensive and effective campaign in the club’s 123-year history, and maybe the history of the environmental movement.” Its litigators and organizers had quietly helped retire one-third of America’s coal fleet in five years - 190 plants in all, about one every 10 days - driving some of the first significant emissions reductions on Earth. The main point of ​“Inside the War on Coal,” and the key insight of the campaign, was that coal power, historically dirty but cheap, was no longer cheap. In fact, merely operating most existing coal plants had become more expensive than building new clean wind and solar farms as well as less-dirty natural gas plants. That’s why the Sierra Club was waging its war alongside unlikely business allies in obscure utility commission hearings, making the case that less coal would mean lower electricity bills. That’s why Beyond Coal attorneys like Kristin Henry, whose bio identified her as ​“one of the few environmentalists who would never be caught wearing Birkenstocks,” kept getting utility executives to admit under oath that coal was gouging their ratepayers. That’s why the billionaire mogul Michael Bloomberg, who had always seen the Sierra Club as a group of shrill anti-capitalist radicals, agreed to finance its coal campaign, although he insisted on a businesslike, analytical approach. The article went viral, presumably because of its unexpected blast of good climate news. The war on coal’s successes had enabled President Barack Obama to pledge U.S. emissions cuts of 28% from 2005 levels by 2025, which had enabled the world to commit to even deeper reductions in the Paris climate accord. Humanity was still addicted to oil, but killing coal looked like a kind of gateway drug rehab. “For the next decade,” I wrote, ​“our climate progress depends mostly on reducing our reliance on the black stuff.” Now, a decade later, President Donald Trump has declared war on the war on coal - or, as he insists everyone in his administration call it, ​“clean, beautiful coal.” So it seems like a good time to see how things are going on the battlefield. The short summary is that Beyond Coal is still winning, and America is continuing to reduce its reliance on the black stuff. But Trump and the artificial-intelligence boom are complicating the war on coal’s endgame. The overall trajectory has been remarkable. Coal now generates about one-seventh of U.S. electricity , down from one-half in 2010; solar and wind, little more than rounding errors when the campaign began, currently...

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