COP26 highlights clean energy, but quitting coal is not easy in some countries

While some at COP26 conference want coal to be left in the past as the world moves towards green and sustainable energy, it is not so simple for developing countries.

Every day, Raju gets on his bicycle and unwillingly pedals the world a tiny bit closer to climate catastrophe.

Every day, he straps half a dozen sacks of coal pilfered from mines — up to 200 kilograms, or 440 pounds — to the reinforced metal frame of his bike. Driving mostly at night to avoid the police and the heat, he transports the coal 16 kilometers (10 miles) to traders who pay him $2.

Thousands of others do the same.

This has been Raju’s life since he arrived in Dhanbad, an eastern Indian city in Jharkhand state in 2016; annual floods in his home region have decimated traditional farm jobs. Coal is all he has.

This is what the United Nations climate change conference in Scotland, known as COP26, is up against.

Earth desperately needs people to stop burning coal, the biggest single source of greenhouse gases, to avoid the most catastrophic impacts of climate change — including the intense flooding that has cost agricultural jobs in India. But people rely on coal. It is the world’s biggest source of fuel for electric power and so many, desperate like Raju, depend on it for their very lives.

“The poor have nothing but sorrow…but so many people, they’ve been saved by coal,” Raju said.

Alok Sharma, the United Kingdom’s president-designate of the conference, said in May that he hoped the conference would mark the moment where coal is left “in the past where it belongs.”