The United Nations (UN) issued its fourth and final report on global climate change last Saturday, putting an exclamation point on the growing consensus that global warming is real, humans have contributed significantly to it and an international effort will be needed to mitigate and reverse its potential negative impacts. It leaves the energy industry facing greater pressures, particularly the coal sector.

The UN document, which is a review of all the major climate science done in recent years, calls for strong limits on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, increased energy efficiency and a market for carbon emission trading. A meeting of the world’s energy ministers Dec. 3 in Bali, Indonesia is where the UN hopes to get agreement among the world’s industrial powers to address the problem globally.

At the same time, parts of the latest UN assessment make clear that in most of the developing industrial areas of the world, including behemoths such as China and India, the use of coal for electric generation is accelerating at warp speed.

“Even as the political will and grass-roots support to rein in rising carbon dioxide (CO2) levels is growing, a large segment of the world is using more coal then ever,” the Los Angeles Times reported Sunday as part of its assessment of the UN report’s release. “The panel’s road map for action hinges on all the world’s biggest carbon polluters significantly reducing their emissions during the next 20 years.”

The LA Times‘ report quoted a Stanford University researcher, Michael Wara, as saying that if in 20 years India and China aren’t working to reduce their nation’s GHG emissions, “the game is lost.”

UN statistics show that China’s emissions from coal-fired electric generation have increased 114% since 2000; India’s have jumped 27%; and Russia’s GHG emissions from coal have risen 45%. During that time the comparable emissions in the United States have gone up 1%.

Among the fossil fuels, coal produces by far the most GHG emissions for every megawatt of electricity produced — 25% more than oil and 66% more than natural gas. Since 1997, China has increased its coal-fired generation capacity from 145,000 MW to 370,000 MW, according to the UN power plant database.

Nevertheless, the United States continues to be the biggest global source of coal-fired electric generation GHG emissions after China, which had 2.65 billion tons of CO2 emissions in its most recent 12-month period. The United States had 2.2 billion tons of carbon emissions during the same period for coal-fired generation.

One possible solution cited by the UN report and highlighted in the Times‘ assessment comes from integrated gasification combined-cycle and carbon sequestration, the so-called “clean coal” option that many industry people in the United States want to see developed, although most recent reports indicate that the commercial-scale version of this technology is still as far as a decade away.

UN and other researchers, such as Stanford’s Wara, would like to see retrofit technology that the United States and others could export to China to help them clean up their existing coal-fired generation, which now account for 77% of its electricity production, according to the UN report.

“We need a bolt-on solution for those existing plants,” Wara told the Times. “It’s going to be very difficult to tell those people to shut down those plants.”

It is going to be harder for political leaders around the world to ignore the issue now that the UN final report has said global warming is “unequivocal” with the earth’s temperatures having risen 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit in the last 100 years, and 11 of the last 12 years have been among the warmest since 1850.

Whatever success can be achieved, as the UN report and others who have analyzed it have said, is going hinge on finding solutions to the GHG emissions dilemma that also permit and promote economic growth in individual nations and throughout the world.

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