Coal use levels off.

After four decades of nearly uninterrupted growth, world use of coal is no longer growing. It fell 1.4 percent during 1990 and 1991, and preliminary data from 1992 show it falling another 0.3 percent, to 2.18 billion tons (oil equivalent). Economic contraction in Russia and Eastern Europe and a more modest recession elsewhere primarily caused the drop.

In 19th-century Europe and North America, coal fueled the Industrial Revolution, replacing wood as the principal energy source. Even though oil overtook it early this century, coal still provides 28 percent of the world's commercial energy. And its use has more than doubled since 1950.

Though coal was once burned directly to heat homes and to power the steam engines in trains and machinery, most of those markets have since been taken by oil, natural gas, or electricity. In advanced industrial countries, only two major uses of coal remain: smelting iron ore and running electric power plants. In the United States, for example, 87 percent of the coal used goes to electric utilities, up from 17 percent in 1949.

While coal lost market share after World War II, it enjoyed a brief resurgence in the 1970s and 1980s as many countries sought to replace increasingly expensive oil with a more affordable energy source.

More recently, coal has come under pressure from mounting evidence of its environmental damage. Strip mining has laid waste to hundreds of square kilometers in some countries, while coal mining has left miners with black lung disease and filled drinking water with hazardous chemicals. And burning coal emits huge quantities of sulfur and nitrogen oxides, which are damaging crops and forests in scores of countries.

New pollution control technologies can help alleviate some of these problems, but not coal's threat to the global climate. Coal contains 80 percent more carbon per unit of energy than natural gas, and 30 percent more than oil. Burning it released 2.4 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere in 1990, and trapping the carbon that coal releases would be expensive, probably prohibitively so. Some governments are addressing this issue by levying carbon taxes that make coal more expensive and discourage its use.

Global coal use appears likely to plateau and then begin falling in the decades ahead as governments cut subsidies and tighten environmental laws. Over time, the need to meet environmental standards will hurt coal's competitiveness against other fuels.

Many governments maintain coal subsidies to protect mineworkers' jobs. In Germany, for example, coal prices are held at more than five times the world market level. The U.K. government tried to eliminate subsidies and shut down much of the state-controlled coal industry in 1992, but was forced by mineworkers to delay its plans. Two other major producers--China and Poland--each laid off 100,000 miners in 1992 and announced plans to go much further in the future.

Coal mining jobs are also being lost because of the move to strip mining, which is more efficient, as well as the switch to cleaner fuels. In the United States, for instance, coal production rose 15 percent from 1980 to 1988, but mining jobs fell 40 percent.

Coal's last bastion is in a handful of developing countries that cannot afford heavy use of oil and still use coal everywhere, including in the home. China, for example, is now the leading consumer of this fossil fuel, with one quarter of the world total, while India ranks fourth. China currently gets 75 percent of its energy from coal, and planners envision a 40-percent increase in the next eight years. Extensive lung and crop damage tied to the country's heavy dependence on coal are now threatening those plans, however.

Meanwhile, coal use is already falling quickly in the former Soviet Union, where it dropped 18 percent from 1988 to 1991. Further declines are likely as Russia and other republics shut down inefficient coal-fueled factories and replace them with more-efficient plants that run on natural gas.