Date: Tuesday October 29, 2024

Time: 1:00-2:00 PM

Location: IB 2025

Speaker: Michael Davidson, Assistant Professor at the UCSD School of Global Policy and Strategy and the Jacobs School of Engineering

Abstract

Pressures to address climate change are eroding the privileged role coal has held in China throughout its modernization. Phasing down coal requires a suite of supply- and demand-side tools to both reduce production (and therefore, maintain sufficiently high prices) and shift to coal alternatives across diverse consumption sectors. This talk, based on a recently published review, outlines contours of the coming coal transition by documenting coal’s rise in modern China, its status in key debates of today’s energy system, and the range of modeling scenarios of coal’s future to mid-century. In addition, through an analysis of current efforts and impacts in four transition policy areas—supply-side, demand-side, employment and social impacts, and stranded assets and fiscal revenues—it identifies gaps and future recommendations. Emerging scholarship on enhancing political feasibility and fostering a “just transition” needs to move beyond global cases and address highly localized and temporally bound impacts.