Ultimately it is good news, although the number of agendas present when reporting energy news is amazing sometimes.
It would be interesting to find alternative uses for coal that weren't polluting. A more enlightened civilization might use the revenue from that alternate use to fund re-education and social support for people too old to learn new skills other than coal production. In that way you could humanely "close out" the era of coal use on the people whose lives were intimately tied to its existence.
Yes, but if you read the article, it's dropped from 1% to 0.2% - so from a tiny fraction to an even tinier fraction, working out to a drop of 0.1 percentage point per year
So beyond the psychological frame, not much has changed.
In the small case I'm all for it, but when systemic changes are made to the economy I think it would be reasonable to consider helping the translation by redirecting some capital toward that realignment. The existing method of using transfer payments from the new growth to sustain the displaced resources as you wait for them to reallocate takes to long and is itself inefficient.
It would be interesting to find alternative uses for coal that weren't polluting. A more enlightened civilization might use the revenue from that alternate use to fund re-education and social support for people too old to learn new skills other than coal production. In that way you could humanely "close out" the era of coal use on the people whose lives were intimately tied to its existence.