Coal use levels off.

• Author: Flavin, Christopher
• Position: Global coal consumption

After four decades of nearly uninterrupted growth, world use of coal is no longer growing. It fell 1.4 percent during 1990 and 1991, and preliminary data from 1992 show it falling another 0.3 percent, to 2.18 billion tons (oil equivalent). Economic contraction in Russia and Eastern Europe and a more modest recession elsewhere primarily caused the drop.

In 19th-century Europe and North America, coal fueled the Industrial Revolution, replacing wood as the principal energy source. Even though oil overtook it early this century, coal still provides 28 percent of the world's commercial energy. And its use has more than doubled since 1950.

Though coal was once burned directly to heat homes and to power the steam engines in trains and machinery, most of those markets have since been taken by oil, natural gas, or electricity. In advanced industrial countries, only two major uses of coal remain: smelting iron ore and running electric power plants. In the United States, for example, 87 percent of the coal used goes to electric utilities, up from 17 percent in 1949.

While coal lost market share after World War II, it enjoyed a brief resurgence in the 1970s and 1980s as many countries sought to replace increasingly expensive oil with a more affordable energy source.

More recently, coal has come under pressure from mounting evidence of its environmental damage. Strip mining has laid waste to hundreds of square kilometers in some countries, while coal mining has left miners with black lung disease and filled drinking water with hazardous chemicals. And burning coal emits huge quantities of sulfur and nitrogen oxides, which are damaging crops and forests in scores of countries.

New pollution control technologies can help alleviate some of these problems, but not coal's threat to the global climate. Coal contains 80 percent more carbon per unit of energy than natural gas, and 30 percent more than oil. Burning it released 2.4 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere in 1990, and trapping the carbon that coal releases would be expensive, probably prohibitively so. Some governments are addressing this issue by levying carbon taxes that make coal more expensive and...