Beijing , February 7 (ANI): While China's energy transition continues to build momentum--highlighted by sectoral peaking plans and supercharged national and provincial ambition on renewables rapid scaleup--unfortunately, dependency on carbon-intensive fossil fuels is set to stay for the immediate future.

The global phase-out of coal by mid-century is considered vital to the Paris Agreement to limit warming well-below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels. Under the Paris Agreement, 175 nations agreed to common-but-differentiated responsibilities toward limiting global warming to 1.5-2 °C above pre-industrial levels.

Current climate policies including efforts like the Powering Past Coal Alliance will not add up to a global coal exit, a new study shows. Countries phasing coal out of the electricity sector need to broaden their policy strategy, or else they risk pushing the excess coal supply into other industries at home, like steel production, said Bi, Bauer and Jewell.

"Our computer simulation of climate economics and policy making indicates that current policies lead the world to less than a 5 per cent likelihood of phasing out coal by mid-century. This would leave minimal chances of reaching net-zero emissions by 2050 and limiting disastrous climate risks," added Bi.

"The most shocking result was that even though most countries decide to stop burning coal for electricity during the simulation, this has almost zero impact on total future coal use," said Bi.

Moreover, carbon pricing and coal mining phase-out would be effective policies.

The coalition may grow as member states work to modernize their electricity sectors, but it may also lead to a rebound in coal use globally. The latter effect often referred to as 'leakage', can arise due to market effects: if demand decreases in some places, so do prices, which in turn can increase demand elsewhere, reported Nature Climate Change.

This means that countries who join can actually increase their coal use in steel, cement and chemicals production, greatly hindering the potential of this initiative, added Nature Climate Change.

The scientists conclude that additional strong policies are needed to avoid this effect.

Meanwhile, Bi said that this is a "golden opportunity for China" - if it acts quickly.

In 2020-2021, China began toning down its outlook on coal, highlighted by President Xi Jinping when he announced that China will strictly control coal consumption until 2025 and start to gradually phase it down thereafter. By the end of 2021, however, China had seemingly completely reneged on this strategy to focus on shoring up coal (and other fossil fuels) supply off the back of energy security and shortage concerns. China has also pledged to end financing for building coal plants overseas, with 2021 marking the first year since 2000 that China's two global policy banks provided no new energy finance commitments to international governments.

Further, the simulation showed that the Alliance only manages to boost solar and wind energy expansion if China decides to phase-out coal.

"If not, then it becomes less clear how we'll achieve sufficient diffusion of renewables worldwide. China's actions today can position it to either lead or impede the global energy transition," added Bi.

"Scientifically analyzing future emissions is subject to a large degree of uncertainties, not least policies. We were able to determine that coal-exit commitments often depend on certain domestic pre-conditions, which enabled us to remove some of the uncertainty on their emission impacts. Our new approach is thus the first to coherently simulate policy adoption in future scenarios which is also in line with historical evidence," said co-author Jessica Jewell from Chalmers University of Technology.

"Things are therefore looking somewhat more promising, but we must account for negative feedbacks alongside the positive for a balanced assessment of policy diffusion in our multipolar world. What remains clear is that governments must take a much more active approach to phasing out coal if they want to stay true to their climate promises," added Edenhofer. (ANI)