John Kerry, Biden’s climate envoy, claims by the end of the decade, there will be no coal in the United States while attending the COP 26 climate conference in Glasgow, Scotland.
“By 2030 in the United States, we won’t have coal,” Kerry said in an interview with Bloomberg.
“We will not have coal plants,” he said.
“Over 500 coal plants in the U.S. have shut in the last few years; another 58 are going to shut this year,” the climate envoy said.
Kerry is the first to publicly comment on Biden’s environmental policy since the infrastructure bill passed Congress. His hope to rid coal from the country by 2030 lines up with Biden’s deadlines to lower greenhouse gasses.
Despite these goals, Axios reported that “the U.S. did not join last week to a pledge, signed by more than 40 countries, to phase out coal-fired power plants in the 2030s and 2040s.”
According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), ten percent of our nation’s total energy consumption in 2020 came from coal.
Kerry went on to say, “we’re saying we are going to be carbon-free in the power sector by 2035.” “I think that’s leadership. I think that’s indicative of what we can do,” he said.