The big climate news last week was President Obama’s decision to reject the Keystone oil pipeline, so there wasn’t much attention paid to an electric utility’s decision to retire a 60-year-old coal plant in Alton, Illinois. Unlike Keystone, the Wood River Power Station isn’t a global symbol of global warming. Its owner is closing it voluntarily, for economic as well as environmental reasons. And coal plants get shut down all the time; Wood River was the 206th announced retirement in the U.S. in the last five years, representing about one third of the coal fleet’s capacity.

In terms of the carbon emissions broiling the planet, however, that’s actually the bigger news. While the rejection of Keystone is a huge symbolic victory for climate activists, and a nice talking point for Obama to use at the global climate talks in Paris, the ongoing destruction of the U.S. coal industry is a much more tangible victory for the climate. With Keystone, Obama laid down a marker that the U.S. intends to slash emissions and leave fossil fuels in the ground in the future, but coal retirements are already doing that at a rapid pace right now.

It’s awkward for Obama to admit, because he officially favors an “all-of-the-above” energy policy, and the U.S. really is producing record amounts of oil and gas as well as wind and solar. But his presidency has been a catastrophe for coal. Unlike oil, which remains the dominant source of transportation fuel, coal has been eclipsed by natural gas and in some areas by renewables as the most cost-effective source of electricity. And since coal is the dirtiest fossil fuel, even worse for the planet than the oil from Alberta’s tar sands, its swoon has provided tremendous relief for the climate, dwarfing the impact of Keystone.

The latest numbers are startling. A new Sierra Club report with data from the Rhodium Group found that overall U.S. emissions will drop this year to their lowest level since 1995, even though U.S. economic output is at an all-time high. In the power sector, the closure of coal plants that once spewed about 128 million metric tons of carbon into the atmosphere every year has helped cut emissions 18 percent from 2005 levels—and plants that produced almost twice as many greenhouse gases have been scheduled for retirement. That’s already enough to meet the 2022 emissions targets in Obama’s Clean Power Plan, even though the ink on the plan is barely dry, and almost enough to meet its 2025 targets that Obama will ask the world to emulate in Paris.

Of course, there is no reason to think the retirements will stop with Wood River, especially now that the Clean Power Plan and so many other coal-related regulations are in place, so there is every reason to expect emissions to drop even further. For example, also last week, a report that led to the retirement of coal plant #205 in Tonawanda, New York, recommended the mothballing of another New York plant that could soon become #207. The coal industry is hemorrhaging cash, to the extent that the National Mining Association recently named the CEO of the bankrupt coal company Alpha Natural Resources to be its chairman. Its choices were limited; Patriot Coal, Walter Energy, and James River Coal also went bust this year, and the giant Arch Coal may follow suit soon. The U.S. retired as much coal in 2015 as it retired in the two decades before Obama took office, and the head of West Virginia’s largest utility recently warned that even if Obama’s carbon plan is blocked in court, coal isn’t coming back.

Coal produced about half of America’s power in 2005, but it’s down to 36 percent and falling fast. That’s partly because Obama’s rules limiting soot, smog, mercury, coal ash, and other pollutants have made coal generation more expensive, partly because the fracking revolution has driven down the price of natural gas, partly because renewables are getting much cheaper as well. Wind power has tripled in the Obama era, as its cost has dropped by two thirds; solar capacity has spiked more than 20-fold, as its price has dropped 80 percent. Michael Brune, the director of the Sierra Club, and Michael Bloomberg, who has poured $80 million into the club’s Beyond Coal campaign, published an article at cnn.com last week titled “We’re Winning the War on Coal.” It was telling that the Kentucky Coal Association complained that their use of the phrase “war on coal,” a longtime mantra of pro-coal forces who resent Obama and his EPA, was “completely offensive.” Soldiers often sound unenthusiastic about wars they know they’ve lost.

The Rhodium Group data suggest that coal retirements have been responsible for most U.S. emission cuts, but they are not the only reason overall U.S. emissions this year will beat the 2015 target set by the Democratic cap-and-trade bill that died in Congress six years ago. For example, Americans are also using less oil, thanks largely to Obama’s strict fuel-efficiency standards for cars and trucks. That said, there are not really cost-effective alternatives to oil for transportation yet, although electric vehicles are getting close, so the transition away from coal for electricity is likely to remain the most important source of emissions cuts for a while. By the end of 2017, the Sierra Club hopes to lock in retirement dates for half the American coal fleet, or 166 gigawatts of capacity; 95 gigawatts are already on the way out.

This is a big reason why Obama said in his Keystone announcement that the pipeline had “occupied what I, frankly, consider an overinflated role in our political discourse.” It is also a big reason why many commentators have dismissed Keystone as a political sideshow that would not have produced the economic boom its supporters promised, or the climate disaster its enemies predicted. The critics are right about the substance, more or less, although that does not mean that Obama was wrong to reject the pipeline. Keystone may not have been a perfectly logical fight, but it was the fight the activists picked, and politicians don’t always get to pick which fights get fought. They only get to pick which side they’re on.

Obama has picked the side of the climate, and he will surely remind his fellow world leaders of that choice when they meet November 30 in Paris. Still, he will have a much stronger argument to persuade them to commit to emissions cuts, an argument he mentioned briefly during his Keystone announcement: “Even as our economy has continued to grow, America has cut our total carbon pollution more than any other country on Earth.” For years, leaders of the developing world have said they won’t act on climate until the major emitters of the developed world take the lead. Quietly, in places like Alton, Ill., and Tonawanda, N.Y., not to mention Indianapolis and the Chicago suburbs and the heart of rural Kentucky coal country, America has done just that.



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