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It’s not like flipping a switch

A decade ago, Ontario stopped burning coal for power. Could past lessons apply to a transition away from natural gas? We chat with reporter Fatima Syed for this newsletter

By Karan Saxena

Dec. 10, 2024

This article is more than 6 months old

Not like flipping a switch

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Illustration of a slide projector displaying three archival images: a newspaper article, two men in an office space, a power plant

“I’m in my coal hole today.”

That’s what Ontario reporter Fatima Syed has been saying for weeks, updating the team on what she’d be reporting on. The story? Marking 10 years since Ontario got off coal — the first jurisdiction in the world to do so! — and a look back at all it took to get there.

Before the transition, many had collectively come to accept the effects of coal as their reality — more smoggy days than ever, asthma and other respiratory problems, the sky looking wrong and the air tasting toxic. It was doctors who united to sound the alarms on the province’s coal reliance, so that things would finally change.

“People don’t listen to environmentalists,” Bruce Lourie, a consultant at the time who was among the first to connect the smog health crisis to energy policy, told Fatima. “But everyone listens to doctors.”

Fatima found real hope in the coal hole. “I’ve lost count of how many times people have told me ‘It’s not easy, you can’t just get off fossil fuels with the flick of a switch.’ I’m aware we can’t transition overnight,” she told me. “But Ontario really did it. We got off coal!”

There’s still a bit of a catch, no doubt — Ontario’s transition was in part successful because of a shift to methane-heavy natural gas, which is cleaner than coal but not that clean. Today, it’s responsible for a third of Ontario’s emissions and is increasingly relied upon to keep the lights on. Now there’s a growing push to phase out natural gas.

What lessons might the coal transition offer? Fatima dug through archives of past reporting — an epic tale of how politicians, industry, doctors and advocates mitigated a health crisis, all while laying the groundwork for a fairly clean power grid today.

🔗 Sick of smog, this Canadian province killed coal. A decade later, it weighs its next big energy move

That’s the story that landed on our site this week, straight from the coal hole. To top it all off, Fatima and Kevin Ilango, our outgoing art and design fellow, came up with a Mad Men-style “coal carousel,” to help transport readers back in time. (Since the reference was lost on me, she said the episode with Don Draper’s photo carousel on the projector is arguably one of the best television episodes of all time? I can’t vouch for that, so you should just see the illustrations yourself.)

“I often feel heavy reporting on the climate emergency,” Fatima said. “The players are too powerful and the solutions can seem complicated at times. But I live in a province that did the impossible.” Could Ontario do it again? Go check out Fatima’s feature to find out.

Take care and flip the switch,

Karan Saxena
Audience engagement editor

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