Canada co-hosts ‘coal-free day’ at UN climate meeting in Poland – by Mia Rabson (The Canadian Press/Global News – December 8, 2018)

https://globalnews.ca/

OTTAWA — Canada and the United Kingdom are hosting a “coal-free day” at the United Nations climate talks in Katowice, Poland, a city built on coal mining.

Poland relies on coal for almost 80 per cent of its electricity, more than double the global average, and Katowice is the heart of its industry. The city of about 300,000 people grew up around workshops and mills fuelled by the coal deposits abundant in the ground.

At the International Congress Centre in Katowice, where thousands of environment leaders and representatives from almost every country in the world are meeting for at least two weeks, you can see the smoke stacks and plumes of coal exhaust from nearby power plants.

Attendees, whose mission at these talks is to set rules for monitoring countries’ progress in meeting their climate-change promises, were greeted by the Polish Coal Miners Band. Displays inside the conference hall include wire baskets filled with coal. Coal jewelry and soap are for sale. The “COP24” conference’s main sponsors are all coal companies, including the Polish state-owned coal-mining concern and the state-owned power company.

Coal is the world’s dirtiest source of electricity, producing generally twice the greenhouse-gas emissions of natural gas and contributing to air pollution that kills an estimated 800,000 people a year.

For the rest of this article: https://globalnews.ca/news/4743482/canada-anti-coal-united-nations/