<story><title>For First Time Since 1800s, Britain Goes a Day Without Burning Coal for Power</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/21/world/europe/britain-burning-coal-electricity.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>MarkMc</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t understand why the Carbon Price Floor was a &amp;#x27;poorly designed policy&amp;#x27;.  From your description, it had exactly the intended effect - it reduced carbon emissions.  That coal was pushed out so early might not have been foreseen, but why does that matter?</text></item><item><author>pash</author><text>This is an astoundingly vapid article. If you want to understand why and how the UK has so quickly reduced the amount of coal it burns, Carbon Brief has a much more informative overview [0].&lt;p&gt;The basic explanation of what happened is simple: the UK instituted a carbon tax that made coal more expensive than natural gas per unit of electricity produced, so British utilities shut down their coal plants and replaced them with gas plants as quickly as possible.&lt;p&gt;The backstory is somewhat more complicated, and much more interesting. The British tax was implemented in 2013 as a local fix to a broken EU carbon-trading program; that program, called the Emissions Trading Scheme [1], allocated to electrical utilities in the EU the right to produce a fixed amount of carbon emissions (and carbon-equivalent emissions), and the rights were made transferable—a typical cap-and-trade set-up. And then the basic problem with that typical set-up occurred: the fixed supply of rights to produce emissions proved higher than the EU&amp;#x27;s electrical sector&amp;#x27;s total demand, a consequence mostly of lower than expected demand for electricity during the recession that followed the financial crisis of a decade ago, but also partly due to other clean-energy initiatives and to big changes in world energy markets. And so the price of emissions rights collapsed.&lt;p&gt;That wasn&amp;#x27;t really a problem—no more carbon was being pumped into the air than the ETS allowed—but it made plain the fact that the ETS was doing nothing at all to reduce emissions. So British lawmakers decided to implement their own carbon tax, called the Carbon Price Floor [2], in order to reduce emissions and support the development of clean energy. The tax rate Parliament set was one of the highest in the world, and as it turned out it was just high enough to make coal slightly more expensive than natural gas for generating electricity, an outcome entirely unforeseen when the policy was decided, just as global production of natural gas was beginning to boom and its price to plummet.&lt;p&gt;So in the end, a bunch of poorly designed policies and their unforeseen consequences led to a better than expected outcome: Britain has been weened off coal decades earlier than was thought possible.&lt;p&gt;0. &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.carbonbrief.org&amp;#x2F;analysis-uk-cuts-carbon-record-coal-drop&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.carbonbrief.org&amp;#x2F;analysis-uk-cuts-carbon-record-co...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;1. &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;European_Union_Emission_Trading_Scheme&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;European_Union_Emission_Trad...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;2. &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.gov.uk&amp;#x2F;government&amp;#x2F;publications&amp;#x2F;carbon-price-floor-reform&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.gov.uk&amp;#x2F;government&amp;#x2F;publications&amp;#x2F;carbon-price-floo...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>curun1r</author><text>Where does the UK get its natural gas? If it&amp;#x27;s like most of Europe, it&amp;#x27;s now dependant on Russia for that. And pipeline politics is a huge driver of the situation in Syria and the refugee crisis. And if reports are to believed, Russia&amp;#x27;s meddling is behind Brexit, Trump and the wave of xenophobic populism that&amp;#x27;s sweeping the world at the moment.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m not saying that coal is better or even a necessary evil, but we shouldn&amp;#x27;t pretend that natural gas is some kumbaya solution to pollution and climate change. Even without the controversy over fracking, natural gas has consequences that may be even worse than the effects of coal.</text></comment>
<story><title>For First Time Since 1800s, Britain Goes a Day Without Burning Coal for Power</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/21/world/europe/britain-burning-coal-electricity.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>MarkMc</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t understand why the Carbon Price Floor was a &amp;#x27;poorly designed policy&amp;#x27;.  From your description, it had exactly the intended effect - it reduced carbon emissions.  That coal was pushed out so early might not have been foreseen, but why does that matter?</text></item><item><author>pash</author><text>This is an astoundingly vapid article. If you want to understand why and how the UK has so quickly reduced the amount of coal it burns, Carbon Brief has a much more informative overview [0].&lt;p&gt;The basic explanation of what happened is simple: the UK instituted a carbon tax that made coal more expensive than natural gas per unit of electricity produced, so British utilities shut down their coal plants and replaced them with gas plants as quickly as possible.&lt;p&gt;The backstory is somewhat more complicated, and much more interesting. The British tax was implemented in 2013 as a local fix to a broken EU carbon-trading program; that program, called the Emissions Trading Scheme [1], allocated to electrical utilities in the EU the right to produce a fixed amount of carbon emissions (and carbon-equivalent emissions), and the rights were made transferable—a typical cap-and-trade set-up. And then the basic problem with that typical set-up occurred: the fixed supply of rights to produce emissions proved higher than the EU&amp;#x27;s electrical sector&amp;#x27;s total demand, a consequence mostly of lower than expected demand for electricity during the recession that followed the financial crisis of a decade ago, but also partly due to other clean-energy initiatives and to big changes in world energy markets. And so the price of emissions rights collapsed.&lt;p&gt;That wasn&amp;#x27;t really a problem—no more carbon was being pumped into the air than the ETS allowed—but it made plain the fact that the ETS was doing nothing at all to reduce emissions. So British lawmakers decided to implement their own carbon tax, called the Carbon Price Floor [2], in order to reduce emissions and support the development of clean energy. The tax rate Parliament set was one of the highest in the world, and as it turned out it was just high enough to make coal slightly more expensive than natural gas for generating electricity, an outcome entirely unforeseen when the policy was decided, just as global production of natural gas was beginning to boom and its price to plummet.&lt;p&gt;So in the end, a bunch of poorly designed policies and their unforeseen consequences led to a better than expected outcome: Britain has been weened off coal decades earlier than was thought possible.&lt;p&gt;0. &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.carbonbrief.org&amp;#x2F;analysis-uk-cuts-carbon-record-coal-drop&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.carbonbrief.org&amp;#x2F;analysis-uk-cuts-carbon-record-co...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;1. &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;European_Union_Emission_Trading_Scheme&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;European_Union_Emission_Trad...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;2. &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.gov.uk&amp;#x2F;government&amp;#x2F;publications&amp;#x2F;carbon-price-floor-reform&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.gov.uk&amp;#x2F;government&amp;#x2F;publications&amp;#x2F;carbon-price-floo...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Ensorceled</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s poorly designed because there is no incentive in the policy to continue reducing global warming.  The problem isn&amp;#x27;t solved yet.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s also poorly designed, for the UK, in that UK power generation just bought the unused credits from other EU nations and really didn&amp;#x27;t reduce their coal usage.</text></comment>