New Study Suggests We’re Overestimating Coal’s Planet-Wrecking Power

The world doesn’t have nearly as much coal as many analysts have been suggesting, according to a new paper from PhD candidate Justin Ritchie at the University of British Columbia. Though growth in demand for coal may be slowing down—and in the United States actually falling, thanks to cheap and plentiful shale gas—on the supply side of things greens have still found plenty of cause for concern. The dirty energy source is still relatively abundant, and our gloomiest case models for future emissions growth include the complete consumption of the fossil fuel in the coming decades, an unlikely scenario given the way things are going on the demand side but nonetheless a useful piece of our preparation for all potential medium-term futures.

But those extreme coal-use scenarios have been relying on inaccurate data, according to Ritchie. Bloomberg reports:

Inflated coal estimates had become at some point “a virtually unlimited backstop supply [that] has misinformed a generation of long-term energy scenarios,” Ritchie and his co-author, UBC professor Hadi Dowlatabadi, write in their paper. The estimates reflected all geologically identified coal, not the fraction it may be possible to dig out. […]

“For the past quarter-century, high emission baselines have been the focus of research, explicitly or implicitly shaping national policy benchmarks, such as estimates for the social cost of carbon,” the paper says, referring to the dollars-per-ton measure used by government and business to factor future climate damage into today’s spending.

Now, for the necessary caveats: coal still reigns as our worst option for climate friendly energy production, and its consumption still represents a major threat to efforts to stave off potentially catastrophic warming in the coming years.

That said, Ritchie’s research shows that the worst-case scenarios envisioned by the climate scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), widely considered to be the authority on climate change, are using outdated and inaccurate information about the global supply of coal.

The takeaway here shouldn’t be that climate change is somehow less of an immediate problem (it isn’t) or that coal is suddenly not a primary driver of climate change (it still is), but rather that our climate models remain far from reliable. We are constantly hearing of new ways researchers are tinkering with these models as they discover new variables or relationships between variables, or in this case refine the data sets upon which this complex modeling relies.

Climate science is very much a field that studies the future, that studies change (it’s right there in the name, climate change), but there is still so much we don’t know about what’s to come, and about what sorts of changes we’re in for. The basics are well understood at this point—greenhouse gases (GHGs) raise surface temperatures, and industrialization has led to an historic increase in those GHGs—but the “fiddly bits” aren’t yet nailed down, and in many cases don’t even appear to be close to the “settled” position greens promise us climate science has now achieved.