To keep global warming below 1.5°C, unabated coal power should significantly decline by 2030 1,2 and in most scenarios cease by 2050 1,3 . The members of the Powering Past Coal Alliance (PPCA), launched in 2017 at the UNFCCC Conference of the Parties, commit to "phasing out existing unabated coal power generation and a moratorium on new coal power generation without operational carbon capture and storage" 4 . The Alliance has been hailed as a "political watershed" 5 and a new "anti-fossil fuel norm" 6 . Here we estimate that the premature retirement of power plants pledged by PPCA members would cut 1.6 GtCO2, which is 150 times smaller than globally committed emissions from existing coal power plants. We also investigate the prospect of major coal consumers joining the Alliance by systematically comparing PPCA members to non-members. PPCA members extract and use less coal and have older power plants, but this alone does not fully explain their pledges to phase-out coal power. In addition, the members of the Alliance are wealthier and have more transparent and independent governments. Thus, what sets them aside from major coal consumers such as China and India are both the smaller costs of coal phase-out and the higher capacity to bear these costs.

Ending the use of unabated coal power is a key climate change mitigation measure. However, we do not know how fast it is feasible to phase-out coal on the global scale. Historical experience of individual countries indicates feasible coal phase-out rates, but can these be upscaled to the global level and accelerated by deliberate action? To answer this question, we analyze 72 national coal power phase-out pledges and show that these pledges have diffused to more challenging socio-economic contexts and now cover 17% of the global coal power fleet but their impact on emissions (up to 4.8 Gt CO2 avoided by 2050) remains small compared to what is needed for achieving Paris climate targets. We also show that the ambition of pledges is similar across countries and broadly in line with faster historical precedents of coal power decline. While some pledges strengthen over time, up to 10% have been weakened by the energy crisis caused by the Russo-Ukrainian war. We construct scenarios of coal power decline based on empirically-grounded assumptions about future diffusion and ambition of coal phase-out pledges. We show that under these assumptions unabated power generation from coal in 2022-2050 would range from generation equivalent to the median in 2°C-consistent IPCC AR6 pathways and three-quarters of 2.5°C-consistent pathways. More ambitious coal phase-out scenarios require much stronger effort in Asia than in OECD countries which raises fairness and equity concerns. The majority of the 1.5°C- and 2°C-consistent IPCC pathways envision even more unequal distribution of effort and faster coal power decline in India and China than has ever been historically observed in individual countries or pledged by climate leaders.

Phasing out fossil fuels requires destabilizing incumbent regimes while protecting vulnerable groups negatively affected by fossil fuel decline. We argue that sequencing destabilization and just transition policies addresses three policy problems: phasing out fossil fuels, transforming affected industries, and ensuring socio-economic recovery in fossil resource-dependent regions. We identify the key mechanisms shaping the evolution of the three systems associated with these policy problems: (1) transformations of technological systems addressed by the socio-technical transitions literature; (2) responses of firms and industries addressed by the management and business literature; and (3) regional strategies for socio-economic recovery addressed by the regional geography and economics literatures. We then draw on Elinor Ostrom’s approach to synthesize these different bodies of knowledge into a diagnostic tool which enables scholars to identify the phase of decline for each system, across which the nature and importance of different risks to sustained fossil fuel decline varies. The main risk in the first phase is lock-in or persistence of status quo. In the second phase, the main risk is backlash from directly affected companies and workers. In the third phase the main risk is regional despondence. We illustrate our diagnostic tool with three empirical cases of phases of coal decline: South Africa (phase 1), the United States (phase 2), and the Netherlands (phase 3). Our review contributes to developing effective policy sequences for phasing out fossil fuels.

While macroeconomic models highlight rapid coal phase-out as an urgent climate mitigation measure, its socio-political feasibility is unclear. The negative impacts of coal phase-out for companies, workers and coal-dependent regions, and the unequal global distribution of the coal phase-out burden has triggered resistance and calls for just transitions. Here, we construct a database of domestic and international just transition policies and partnerships that compensate affected actors of coal phase-outs. By comparing coal phase-out in countries which have compensation plans with those that don’t, we show that compensation policies are essential to realizing premature retirement of coal. The cost we estimate associated with these policies clarifies the financial cost of making coal phase-out politically feasible. We find that compensation costs are proportional to avoided emissions resulting from coal phase-out and are generally consistent with recent carbon prices. We find that the cost of implementing similar compensation policies in case of 1.5°C -consistent coal phase-out for China and India is 17 times higher than all existing compensation, and roughly comparable to global Official Development Assistance in 2021. We show that in the case of coal phase-out, political will and social acceptance have a tangible economic component which should be factored in to assessing the feasibility of achieving climate targets.