Coal exports make U.S. cleaner, EU more polluted

Shale gas has jolted traditional roles in the planet’s climate drama, giving cleaner fuel to the United States, whose displaced coal has headed to Europe to pollute the old continent.

It is an ironic twist for the European Union, whose energy policy is largely based on promoting renewables and a target to cut emissions b y 20 percent by 2020. The U.S. did not ratify the Kyoto Protocol to combat global emissions and its national goals are far less ambitious than Europe’s.

Analysts at Point Carbon, a Thomson Reuters company, estimate increased EU coal-use will drive a 2.2 percent rise in EU carbon emissions this year, after a 1.8 percent drop in 2011.

U.S. emissions, meanwhile, are expected to fall by roughly the same amount – 2.4 percent – chiefly because of reduced coal use, according to estimates from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA).

Still the U.S. remains a bigger emitter than the EU as a whole, ranking second in the world after China, and the 2012 trend is not expected to last as U.S. coal burn will rebound and the share of renewable sources in Europe will rise, cutting carbon emissions.

“The renewable energy sector is to a large extent politically-determined. EU member states have committed to legally-binding renewables 2020 targets and therefore, we expect to see renewable energy capacity grow,” Morten Hultberg Buchgreitz, acting deputy chief executive of DONG Energy’s wind power division, said.

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