US climate envoy John Kerry said new coal mining without technology to capture carbon emissions was going in the “opposite direction” ...
...to efforts to address climate change, just days after the UK approved the first coal mine in Britain for 30 years.
“Unabated coal is the opposite direction from where most advocates on behalf of meeting our challenges on climate are positioned.”
“Nobody I know, in most parts of world, is financing new coal plants of one kind or another,” he said in an interview, after delivering the Fulbright lecture at King’s College London.
The project has made a commitment to net zero emissions over its lifetime by using so-far under-developed carbon capture technology and offsetting.
The approval of a new coal mine for the first time in decades was “an embarrassment,” said the former Speaker of the House of Lords, Baroness Helene Hayman, in her formal response to the Kerry lecture.
He said French president Emmanuel Macron’s trip to the US raised the profile of some of those questions.
Trade experts have suggested that exceptions and waivers could be included, using the experience of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement.