NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

There’s little debate that phasing out coal-fired power plants is necessary to avoid the worst climate change scenarios. Yet rather than fade away, coal, the biggest source of carbon emissions, is experiencing a renaissance. Worries about global warming have been overtaken by more prosaic ones about keeping the lights on. Those concerns are the result of shortfalls of a different power source — natural gas — brought on by the disruptions of the pandemic and the war in Ukraine.