Carbon dioxide emissions in the United Kingdom declined by 6 percent in 2016 thanks to a record 52 percent drop in coal use, according to a report published Friday by the London-based climate policy website Carbon Brief.
Coal suffered at the hands of cheap natural gas, plentiful renewables, energy conservation and a stiff tax on greenhouse gas emissions, the group said.
The latest reductions put the country’s carbon dioxide emissions 36 percent below 1990 levels. The UK hasn’t seen emissions so low since the late 19th century, when coal was king in British households and industry. Coal emissions have fallen 74 percent since 2006.
The dramatic cuts reflect ambitious efforts by the UK in recent years to tackle climate change. In Nov. 2015 the country announced it would phase out all coal-powered electricity plants by 2025. But in the past year, cheaper renewables flooded the market, pushing coal aside. Last May, the country for the first time generated more electricity from solar power than from coal, with coal emissions falling to zero for several days. In 2016 as a whole, wind power also generated more electricity than coal.
The broad fall in carbon dioxide emissions in 2016 came despite a 12.5 percent increase in pollution from burning natural gas, which competes both with coal and with renewables, and a 1.6 percent increase from oil and gasoline use, according to Carbon Brief.
Carbon Brief also attributes the precipitous drop in emissions from coal to the country’s carbon tax, which doubled in 2015 to £18 ($22) per metric ton of CO2.
The tax has been “the killer blow for coal in the past 18 months to two years,” Peter Atherton of the Cornwall Energy consultancy told the Financial Times. “It’s really changed the economics for it.”
Some question whether the UK will continue ambitious measures to rein in greenhouse gases and other pollutants after its voters decided to exit the European Union. A leaked European Parliament document, however, suggests the EU will seek to hold the UK to previously agreed environmental targets.
The Carbon Brief analysis of emissions is based on energy use figures from the UK’s Department of Energy, Business and Industrial Strategy. The department will publish its own CO2 estimates on March 30.
About This Story
Perhaps you noticed: This story, like all the news we publish, is free to read. That’s because Inside Climate News is a 501c3 nonprofit organization. We do not charge a subscription fee, lock our news behind a paywall, or clutter our website with ads. We make our news on climate and the environment freely available to you and anyone who wants it.
That’s not all. We also share our news for free with scores of other media organizations around the country. Many of them can’t afford to do environmental journalism of their own. We’ve built bureaus from coast to coast to report local stories, collaborate with local newsrooms and co-publish articles so that this vital work is shared as widely as possible.
Two of us launched ICN in 2007. Six years later we earned a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting, and now we run the oldest and largest dedicated climate newsroom in the nation. We tell the story in all its complexity. We hold polluters accountable. We expose environmental injustice. We debunk misinformation. We scrutinize solutions and inspire action.
Donations from readers like you fund every aspect of what we do. If you don’t already, will you support our ongoing work, our reporting on the biggest crisis facing our planet, and help us reach even more readers in more places?
Please take a moment to make a tax-deductible donation. Every one of them makes a difference.
Thank you,
Phil McKenna
Reporter, Boston
Phil McKenna is a Boston-based reporter for Inside Climate News. Before joining ICN in 2016, he was a freelance writer covering energy and the environment for publications including The New York Times, Smithsonian, Audubon and WIRED. Uprising, a story he wrote about gas leaks under U.S. cities, won the AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Award and the 2014 NASW Science in Society Award. Phil has a master’s degree in science writing from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was an Environmental Journalism Fellow at Middlebury College.
