What do you do with fossil fuel facilities - coal mines, oil and gas wells, power plants - once they're no longer economically and/or environmentally viable?

This is a thorny problem facing governments from India to the United States. And it's not just a question of the land and the assets built on it. There's the challenge of replacing the jobs provided by those dirty industries too.

Our U.S. tech correspondent, Avi Asher-Schapiro, travelled to the former coal hub of Appalachia in Kentucky, where companies and investors are on the hunt for new bitcoin mining sites - and the power needed to run them.

There he met Warren Rogers, chief strategy officer of Blockware Solutions, whose construction crews have been working long hours through the winter to transform an abandoned coal-washing plant into a new kind of extractive enterprise producing cryptocurrency.

"We're trying to digitize coal," Rogers said.

Lured by tax breaks, bitcoin miners are pouring into the state, some generating their own fossil fuel electricity to power their machines, others using renewables or energy from waste.

But not all local people are convinced the high-tech business will solve employment woes in the economically distressed region, as bitcoin operations tend to need only skeleton staff to guard and maintain their machines, despite plans to train people to repair the banks of computers used.

When it comes to energy-intensive businesses such as bitcoin mining or electric vehicles, their source of power is the key to whether they are green.

In India, Bengaluru resident Suraj Vallamkonda, 29, bought an electric scooter in a bid to reduce his carbon footprint and tackle climate change. But when he plugged it in, he realised he was charging it with fossil fuels.

He wanted to find a cleaner option but didn't have the space on his roof to put in solar panels. So he turned to SundayGrids, a start-up business that helps people meet their home energy needs with power produced by solar systems mounted on malls, schools and other sites across India.

Clients invest virtually in solar "biscuits", or portions of panels, earning green power credits that offset their electricity bills at home.

Digital solar, as it's known, could help propel India's rooftop solar sector, which has lagged behind largely because of the difficulties of installing systems on residential buildings.

"We were mostly living in rented apartments, often moving cities - and as an individual the economics of it and how to install (panels) were also a challenge. But we wanted our say in climate action, like so many other people do," co-founder of SundayGrids Mathew Samuel, 24, told our reporter Anuradha Nagaraj.

As the world wearily marks two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, the hit to economic growth and tax revenue has made it harder for governments - especially in debt-laden developing nations - to meet their targets to cut carbon emissions and adapt to climate change.

In Grenada, the pandemic has led to higher shipping charges for solar panels and employee layoffs, delaying efforts to reach its 2030 climate goals by up to a year, as costs soared 35%, said one official.

And in nearby Jamaica, plans to procure electric buses, install solar panels at schools and plant 3 million trees have been set back as available funding shrank.

It's a pattern seen around the globe, with Indonesia slashing its government budget for climate action by 20% in 2020 and Fiji cutting climate funding by 40%.

Even as climate action becomes more urgent, pressures from the pandemic and, more recently, the  turmoil roiling energy markets due to the Ukraine crisis are disrupting plans that were already insufficient to keep global warming to the Paris Agreement limits. Much is at stake...

See you next week,

Megan

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