President Joe Biden’s climate envoy John Kerry said the United States won’t have coal plants by 2030.
“By 2030 in the United States, we won’t have coal,” Kerry said Tuesday during an interview with Bloomberg at the United Nations’s COP26 climate conference in Glasgow, Scotland. “We will not have coal plants.”
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The U.S., the world’s largest economy, generates nearly 25% of its electricity from coal despite the rapid retirements of coal plants in recent years that have struggled to compete with cheaper and cleaner natural gas and renewable energy.
Kerry’s comment is among the most explicit to-date of a Biden official making clear that the administration sees no role for coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel, in the future power grid. The U.S. refused to join a pledge among more than 20 countries agreed to this week at COP26 to phase out coal use at home.
Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, a state that is a producer of oil and natural gas, has major sway over Biden’s expansive climate and social spending agenda that remains pending in Congress. He previously killed a plan backed by Biden and Democratic leaders to pay utilities to generate more clean electricity and to retire coal and other fossil fuel plants.
Kevin Book, managing director of ClearView Energy Partners, said Kerry’s comment could damage Biden’s popularity in Pennsylvania, a swing state that relies on coal.
“It’s probably not going to help Biden keep Pennsylvania,” said Book, who recalled former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton making a similar promise in her 2016 presidential campaign that backfired.
The U.S. would likely need to retire most, if not, all of its coal plants to meet Biden’s nonbinding goal for the country to generate entirely carbon-free power by 2035. There would also be little role for coal if the U.S. achieves Biden’s pledge to the U.N. as part of the Paris agreement to cut emissions economy-wide in half by 2030.
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There might be exceptions for coal plants that attach equipment to trap carbon dioxide coming out of the smokestack. But no coal plants built with so-called carbon capture technology are currently operational, as it remains an expensive proposition.
Joseph Majkut, energy security and climate change director at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the U.S. will be burning “a lot less coal” by 2030 due to market forces, but getting to “zero is hard.”
He suggested Kerry’s comment could provoke fossil fuel constituencies whose buy-in the administration needs as it pushes its climate agenda.
“Coal states and communities will need help managing the energy transition, but we need to engage them where they are,” Majkut told the Washington Examiner.
