Coal had a bad year last year. It was the latest in a line of tricky years, which have seen coal demand slump , coal companies declare bankruptcy and coal plants shutter.

COVID-19 added to coals woes, as global lockdowns cut demand for electricity. Outpaced by the growth of cheap renewable energy, increasingly shunned by banks and insurers and facing tighter government regulations, the dirtiest of fossil fuels looks to be on its last legs.

But while many experts believe coal is now in an unstoppable death spiral, the pace of change is slow when compared to the scale of the climate crisis we face. Despite countries pledges to slash carbon emissions to tackle climate change, coal is still playing an important role for a handful of countries, notably China , and new coal projects are lined up around the globe. Its still unclear when the worlds last coal plant will shut its doors.

The need for a swift exit from coal is obvious. Coal may have powered industrial revolutions and propelled countries onto the world stage, but its a planetary disaster. It releases more carbon emissions per unit of energy than any other electricity source and is the largest single source of temperature increases , responsible for almost one-third of global warming.

Coal is also a health crisis, releasing air pollution, which increases the risk of cancer, heart disease, asthma and other respiratory diseases. It has scarred the lungs of coal miners and made them even more vulnerable to COVID-19 .

The world cannot continue to extract and burn coal and have any hope of meeting the climate commitments needed to stave off catastrophic climate change. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, coal must be gone by 2050 .

We have to be making radical changes and reductions through 2050 to meet the Paris Agreement [on climate change], said Christine Shearer, program director for coal at the non-profit Global Energy Monitor. So its not enough to say, Oh yeah, yeah, well do it by 2050, and just make some modest movements. We need very, very rapid changes.

The Good News

Globally, coal demand has been falling for the past few years. It dropped by 1.8% in 2019 and the International Energy Agency predicts 2020 will have seen a 5% drop in coal demand, the largest fall since World War II .

Coal-fired plants across the world are shutting their doors. In India, new coal construction has slowed dramatically: Over the first half of 2020, the country retired more coal capacity than it opened. In Europe, 19 EU countries and the U.K. have pledged to phase out coal by 2030 . Spain may well become the first country in the world to completely close down its coal industry it shut seven of its 15 remaining coal plants in the summer of 2020, with the rest expected to close over the next few years.

Coals demise has been particularly stark in the U.S. Despite Donald Trump promising to revive the flagging sector, the last four years saw more coal plants close than during Barack Obamas second presidential term. In 2019, the same year that consumption of energy from renewables overtook coal for the first time, Americas coal use fell by 18%, to its lowest level since 1975 . In Texas, the heart of Americas fossil fuel industry, wind power overtook coal in the states energy mix for the first time in 2020.

The key factor behind coals decline has been market forces. Coal simply cant compete with cheaper, less polluting alternatives of the modern energy economy, said Neha Mathew-Shah, international climate and policy campaign representative at the Sierra Club and one of the authors of Boom and Bust 2020, a report on the coal industry.

Tumbling natural gas prices have hit coal hard, but so too have the technological leaps in renewable energy increasing efficiency and bringing down prices. Solar costs have fallen more than 80% since 2010 and solar is now consistently cheaper than most new coal and gas-fired plants, according to a 2020 report from the International Energy Agency, which dubbed solar the new king of electricity .