Former New York City mayor and climate change crusader Michael Bloomberg announced Friday he is giving $500 million to a campaign to finish killing coal and start killing oil and gas. “The largest coordinated campaign to tackle climate change” ever to occur in the U.S., Bloomberg says, aims to close all of the nation’s coal plants by 2030, and put the country on track discontinue fossil fuel use altogether.
“We’re in a race against time with climate change, and yet there is virtually no hope of bold federal action on this issue for at least another two years. Mother Nature is not waiting on our political calendar, and neither can we,” Bloomberg said in a press release before giving a commencement address at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Beyond Carbon will respond to this crisis with the urgency and ambition that it requires, by taking the fight to the states and turbo-charging current on-the-ground efforts.”
The campaign, called “Beyond Carbon,” is an expansion of the “Beyond Coal” campaign that Bloomberg has partnered on with the Sierra Club and other environmental groups that has helped retire more than half the nation’s coal plants, 289 out of 530, since it began in 2010.
But while Beyond Coal has benefited from piggybacking off coal’s existing market-driven economic challenges, Bloomberg will have a harder time with his secondary goal of preventing the construction of new gas plants. It’s natural gas, which emits half the carbon of coal, that has mostly replaced coal in the electricity sector, supplying 28% of current United States energy, compared to about 11% from renewable sources.