India, Dec. 24 -- Staying within 1.5degC needs the transition to speed up

In its special report on 1.5degC last year, the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) established that a 1.5degC-consistent trajectory requires coal-powered electricity to drop to less than one per cent of the total electricity mix by 2050 . Two-thirds of all coal-fired electricity needs to be phased out by 2030.

Keeping the global economic cost of this transition to a minimum would see the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the European Union (EU) phase out coal power by around 2030, with China and the rest of the world phasing out by around 2040 and 2050 respectively.

One proposal, illustrated below, is to phase out th...