Coal

•  Latest news

Activists shut down Kingsnorth coal power station, UK.
(news story)

Climate change is the greatest threat the world faces. It is already killing hundreds of thousands of people a year and if left unchecked will put hundreds of millions of people at risk.

Catastrophic climate change isn’t inevitable. We know it is caused by human activities, including the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation. The energy sector is responsible for some two-thirds of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Coal-fired power plants are the biggest offenders.

• Coal is the most polluting of all fossil fuels and the largest single source of CO2 in the world.

• Currently one-third of all carbon dioxide emissions come from burning coal.

We can fight climate change, but only if we reduce our dependency on fossil fuels, particularly coal. This is necessary to achieve the 50 percent reduction in global greenhouse gas emissions by mid-century that the world’s leading climate scientists tell us is needed to halt dangerous climate change.

Unfortunately, governments across the world are allowing industry to spend hundreds of billion of dollars to build hundreds of new coal-fired power stations worldwide in the coming years. If they are built, CO2 emissions from coal are expected to rise 60 percent by 2030. This will undermine any international agreements to tackle climate change.

These governments have in part been seduced by an illusion of “clean coal.” The result of a major public relations offensive by the coal industry to encompass a number of dubious “technological fixes” they claim can make burning coal safe for the climate.

One of these Carbon, Capture and Storage (CCS) is a plan to capture carbon emissions from power stations and bury them underground. The technology won’t be ready for at least another twenty years, too late to save the climate. Yet the vague promises of CCS are being used to justify building new coal-fired plants. These plants will spew out enormous amounts of CO2 pollution for at least the next twenty years and probably during their whole 40-year lifetime. In short, any new coal fired power plant will contribute massively to the climate crisis.

The world doesn’t need more coal, it needs an Energy Revolution. The world has enough technically accessible renewable energy to meet current energy demands six times over. Here you can discover how renewable technologies, such as wind, solar, sustainable bioenergy, hydroelectric and more can revolutionise the ways we produce energy, and prevent dangerous climate change.

As world leaders fail to step up and take the necessary action to stop coal, people across the world are taking on the struggles themselves. Across the world  environmental activists, students, doctors, church leaders and many more are mobilising against coal.

Greenpeace’s quit coal campaign supports local community struggles across the globe. From getting Negros province in the Philippines declared a model of 100 percent renewable energy development, to closing down the world’s biggest coal port in Australia, to being part of the coalition that not only stopped a new coal fired plant in New Zealand but kicked coal generation out of the country entirely, to a six day occupations of coal sites in Germany, to taking the anti-coal message to business conferences in China - while our campaigns are diverse, they all carry the same message: quit coal; save the climate.