Britain Makes Great Strides Toward the End of Coal

What happened to coal use in Britain last year is so striking that it's almost hard to believe. In the past 12 months, coal consumption didn’t just decrease: It dropped so sharply that graphs like this one make it look like coal has been pushed off a cliff.

On the decline since December 2005 after a post-millennium high of 7.7 megatons in a month, consumption in October 2016 dropped to a relatively minuscule 0.7 megatons. And what still remains is set to disappear soon, as the U.K. has promised to phase out all coal-fired power plants entirely by 2025. Britain’s power generation has shifted so greatly that the country seems (for now, at least) to be on course to meet its Paris Agreement emission commitments for 2030, though there’s still more work to do to meet goals beyond that.