Giving Compass' Take:

• Nathalie Thomas, Leslie Hook, and Chris Tighe discuss the political and practical factors that led to Britain's transition away from coal. 

• What can other countries learn from this successful transition? Do the factors that impacted Britain's transition apply to the areas you work in?  

• Learn about the benefits of training coal workers for solar power. 

Earlier this year, Britain clocked up its first fortnight without coal power since 1882. And since 2008, the UK has cut the carbon content of its electricity generation at the fastest rate of 25 major economies, ahead of Denmark, the U.S. and China, according to Imperial College London and energy consultancy E4tech.

Its transformation from coal powerhouse—as recently as 1960, coal mining employed more than 600,000 people—to almost coal power-free is hugely significant at a time when countries are grappling with how to meet the 2015 Paris climate deal to limit global warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius. To achieve this, global emissions of carbon dioxide should already be declining by 3 percent a year—but instead, they are still rising, reaching a record high in 2018.

The EU is pushing for a bloc-wide target to cut net CO2 emissions to zero by 2050—a target the UK committed to law this summer. Yet some member states are still heavily reliant on the fuel. Poland, for example, still draws 80 percent of its electricity from coal-fired plants. And in Germany, the biggest coal consumer and biggest power producer in the EU, coal accounted for just over a third of power generation last year.

Since Britain's first centralized natural gas plant was commissioned in 1991, the fuel, which is less polluting than coal, has become the biggest single contributor to power generation in the UK—accounting for almost 40 percent in 2018.

"The dash for gas in the 1990s is huge as far as the coal decline is concerned," says Richard Howard, research director at Oxford-based consultancy Aurora. By then, Britain had a domestic offshore oil and gas industry in the North Sea offering plentiful supplies. And coal had already been phased out from other key parts of the economy. Steam trains had been replaced by diesel. Homes, once heated by coal, were fitted with modern gas boilers.

In 1991, the EU lifted restrictions on the use of natural gas for power generation. The move proved a catalyst and came just 12 months after Britain's electricity system had been privatized, leading the newly private enterprises to build gas-fired power stations that had lower capital costs rather than coal.

Read the full article about Britain's transition away from coal by Nathalie Thomas, Leslie Hook, and Chris Tighe at InsideClimate News.