I don't think that heating with coal is a thing anymore. Power production is, though and that goes into electric cars or cooling buildings. Heating with electricity can be done quite efficiently via heat exchangers but is not used that often besides relatively new single-family homes.

Depends on where you live. Poland is burning more coal than it was in the 90s, and a significant amount of that is still for home heating

The world as a whole is burning more coal in 2020 than in 1990 (and 2020 was a big downyear because of covid).

But what's more surprising is that even in per-capita terms, global coal usage has increased since 1990.

However if you change your baseline year from 1990 to 2012, then global coal usage in absolute terms has declined, and will continue to decline over the long term even if there is a bump from the 2020 depressed levels (2020 is a terrible year to benchmark against).

"Poland is burning more coal than it was in the 90s"

Not true, coal usage[1]: 1990 -> 237Mt, 2016 -> 149Mt

As a tangent, I was shocked that Poland CO2 emission per capita is lower than one of Norway [2]: Norway 9.4t (2018), Poland 8.8t (2018)

[1] https://www.worldometers.info/coal/poland-coal/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...

They aren’t as cost effective, powerful, or as widely deployed.

That's exactly the point of creating a CO2e tax : making cleaner energies more cost effective by subsidizing them.

Renewable energies are cheap (they are basically "free"). Deploying them is expensive. But you only have to subsidize the cost of deployment and after that it's cheaper for everyone.

It's the same thing with insulation : it's expensive, but once it's done correctly, you can basically heat your entire house with only the sun (if it's there) or really low energy consumption.

We're just missing the political will. The transition is possible and would create jobs for the decades to come.

> Renewable energies are cheap (they are basically "free"). Deploying them is expensive.

That just sounds like a half-truth, otherwise people wouldn't always be so impassioned about subsidising renewable. They'd jest buy land and build honking great renewable plants.

Now the situation may have changed in the last decade or so, because the growth in renewables is very real. But it takes no political will to deploy cheap energy. There would be queues of bankers trying to invest if they thought they could undercut market producers and make good returns. Every greedy person on the planet (so somewhere in the region of 8 billion of them) would be happy to get in on the deal.

You can't just buy land and build wind turbines and solar panels. You need expensive permits and then spend a couple of years in court battling various citizen groups who don't like renewables anywhere near their homes. You can't even put solar panels on the roof of an apartment building and then sell the power to the tenants, regulation prevents it.

> You can't even put solar panels on the roof of an apartment building and then sell the power to the tenants, regulation prevents it.

At least in my country, AFAIK regulation explicitly allows for something like that: there's a net metering modality in which a group of consumers (for instance, a condominium) can split the credits from the net metering of a shared solar power plant. It's meant for precisely that scenario (power panels on the roof of an apartment building, each apartment has its own independent meter).

Awesome. I hope Germany fixes the legislation around solar too.

Coal mines and power plants face the same challenges. They manage, somehow.

They manage because politics pushes these things through while creating new regulations for renewables.

E.g. in Germany one of the chancellor candidates was state MP and personally & illegally forced expansion of coal strip mining while enacting new rules making wind power essentially impossible in his state.

They manage mostly by being older than these regulations.

Coal isn't cost effective if you price in the full costs of using it. As long as someone else will pay them for you, yes, it's very cost effective.