Tag: coal

At COP31 Even the UN is Giving Up

Another year has passed, another ‘Conference of the Parties’ (COP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) will convene. Next Monday the travelling circus pitches its tent again, this time in the Turkish Mediterranean resort of Antalya, for COP31, which runs from November 9th to the 20th. Some 100,000 participants are expected.

Meanwhile, the UN has quietly moved the goalposts. UNEP’s Emissions Gap Report 2026, pointedly titled The Point of Return, concedes that limiting warming to 1.5°C without significant overshoot is no longer achievable.

Satirical cartoon depicting COP31 at a beach resort in Antalya, with exhausted UN delegates, discarded climate pledges, postponed goals, and empty promises.
AI generated by Grok

From Tilak´s Substack

By Tilak Doshi

Large COP31 climate conference sign in Antalya, Türkiye, with flags in the background

Another year has passed, another ‘Conference of the Parties’ (COP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) will convene. Next Monday the travelling circus pitches its tent again, this time in the Turkish Mediterranean resort of Antalya, for COP31, which runs from November 9th to the 20th. Some 100,000 participants are expected. Apart from the usual grand-sounding communiqués, more breast-beating by the climate NGOs and alarmist headlines by the legacy media, nothing much of practical significance will come out of COP31 in Türkiye.

After a bruising contest between rival bidders, Turkey won the right to host while Australia’s Climate and Energy Minister, Chris Bowen, was handed the gavel as “President of Negotiations”. One country hosts, another negotiates, and the Pacific islands, with Australia’s help, got a pre-COP of their own. The World Resources Institute’s David Waskow has summed up the defining context of the summit as “heat and Hormuz”, referring to this year’s blistering summer in Europe which supposedly proved that climate crisis is upon us, and to Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, which cut off a significant share of the world’s oil and gas supplies and sent prices soaring.

The Hormuz effect

The climate Establishment has spent months arguing that both Europe’s hot summer and the Hormuz supply shock prove its case. Call it the Hormuz effect: first Ukraine, now Iran – every war in an oil- or gas-producing region exposes our dependence on what Ed Miliband, the UK’s previous energy secretary and now Foreign Minister, called “petrostates and dictators”. The only answer, claims Miliband and fellow climate ideologues in the EU, is “home-grown renewables” that no despot can switch off. UN climate chief Simon Stiell says fossil fuel dependency is “ripping away national security and sovereignty”. At the Petersberg Climate Dialogue in Berlin in April, ministers sensed an opportunity to recast wind and solar as guarantors of energy security, and Britain’s climate minister, Katie White, called the transition “even more imperative”.

It is a curious reading of events. A country at the mercy of imported hydrocarbons might conclude that it should produce more of its own, as Washington has done, rather than double down on intermittent power that needs gas-fired backup on every windless winter evening. Nor is swapping dependence on Gulf oil for dependence on Chinese panels and minerals an obvious gain in sovereignty.

The host’s revealed preference

The Government hosting COP31 is a case in point. Economists have a useful rule: judge people by what they do, not by what they say. Weeks before welcoming the world to Antalya, Türkiye’s Energy Minister Alparslan Bayraktar stood beside Iraq’s Oil Minister and pitched the port of Ceyhan as a “global energy hub” and an alternative to Hormuz, with plans to expand Iraqi pipeline capacity and bring in Qatari gas. A Global Witness analysis of Rystad Energy data projects that the state oil company TPAO will nearly triple its gas production by 2035. Ankara is not abandoning oil and gas. It is positioning itself to collect transit fees on them.

Then there is coal. It still supplies nearly one-third of Türkiye’s electricity, propped up by a guaranteed-price purchase scheme for coal plants that runs to 2030. In June, the Government announced a 1,050 MW expansion of the Cenal coal power plant. When a court struck down the planned expansion of the Afşin-Elbistan lignite plant, the environment ministry, headed by none other than COP31 President Murat Kurum, appealed the ruling. Across the world in Canberra, Bowen’s own Government recently approved an extension of the Saraji open-cut coal mine in Queensland.

The green lobby frames all this as a “credibility” problem for the COP31 hosts. It is nothing of the sort. It is revealed preference. Governments answerable to voters who pay electricity bills and fill petrol tanks will protect energy security first and recite climate pledges second. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said as much, warning that any proposal failing to reconcile climate objectives with social and economic realities is doomed to fail. That may well be the most honest sentence uttered by anyone associated with COP31.

Electrify everything – but with what?

With no agreement on fossil fuels in prospect, the Turkish Presidency’s centrepiece is a voluntary pledge, dubbed ‘35-by-35’, to raise electricity’s share of global energy demand from around 20% today to 35% by 2035. Campaigners were dismayed to find that the text does not ask governments to commit to producing the extra power from clean sources; it says only that the use of clean electricity will vary according to national circumstances. Activists warn that the pledge could allow governments to count expanded gas-fired generation as progress.

From their standpoint, they are right to worry. Around one-third of the world’s electricity is still generated from coal. More fundamentally, electricity remains only a fifth or so of final energy consumption. The rest is the direct burning of oil, gas and coal for transport, industrial heat, petrochemicals, fertilisers and much else that intermittent solar panels and wind turbines cannot provide for. A technology-neutral electrification target is a tacit admission that the decarbonisation of the other four-fifths will not be delivered by UN declarations.

There is a further twist. The fastest-growing source of new power demand in the rich world is artificial intelligence, and data centres need electricity around the clock. The IEA expects their demand to double by 2030; in the United States, gas already supplies 40% of it, and the IEA credits American data-centre demand with supporting coal burn too. The AI boom is being built on gas, coal and nuclear, because wind, solar and batteries cannot feed a voracious appetite for baseload power.

And the cheapest and most reliable source for much of Asia remains coal. The IEA’s mid-year update now expects global coal demand to rise by 1.2% in 2026 to a record 8.94 billion tonnes, reversing its earlier forecast of decline. China and India together account for around 70% of global consumption. If Old King Coal was the elephant in every meeting room at COP28 in Dubai, in Antalya he will paying for the room.

Roadmaps to nowhere

At COP30 in Belém, Brazil last year, more than 80 countries backed a “roadmap” to transition away from fossil fuels, but major oil producers and several emerging economies refused any reference to it in the negotiated text. This week Brazil published that voluntary roadmap, declaring the transition urgent and inevitable, while its officials stressed that it was a call to voluntary action and not a document to be negotiated at COP31. The phase-out of fossil fuels is not even a formal agenda item in Antalya. Instead, the talk is of countries following transition roadmaps ‘tailored’ to their own circumstances and constraints, which in practice means each government will do what it was going to do anyway.

Frustrated by the consensus rule that lets oil producers say no, the zealots have started a parallel track. In April, 57 countries met in Santa Marta, Colombia, for the first conference on transitioning away from fossil fuels; China, Russia and the United States were not invited. It produced only voluntary workstreams, and a Fossil Fuel Treaty backed by just 18 countries did not make the final text. David Wojick of CFACT asks whether such a treaty could become a still more radical rival to the UNFCCC, competing for a shrinking pool of money now that Trump’s America has walked away.

The final outcome in Antalya, too, is being pre-softened. Australia and Turkey will produce a “presidency-led” cover decision which, unlike other formal texts, is not negotiated word by word between governments. After 30 years in which every term of every communiqué was fought over through the night, the COP process is drifting from treaty-making towards a bazaar of voluntary pledges on transition roadmaps and electrification.

Meanwhile, the UN has quietly moved the goalposts. UNEP’s Emissions Gap Report 2026, pointedly titled The Point of Return, concedes that limiting warming to 1.5°C without significant overshoot is no longer achievable. Launching it, Secretary-General António Guterres declared that the mission is now to make any overshoot “as small and as short as possible”. The 1.5°C figure was always an arbitrary limit conjured for the convenience of politicians. Now that it has been formally abandoned, nobody in the climate bureaucracy proposes winding down the apparatus built to defend it. Instead, we get a new target and a plea to return from overshoot.

Delivery without dollars

At one level, every COP is about money: how much Western governments will pay to impose green solutions on themselves, and how much more they will pay, in the form of ‘climate finance’, to persuade the rest of the world to follow. The principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities” built that asymmetry into the system. At COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, rich countries pledged $300 billion a year against the $1.3 trillion demanded by developing countries, papering over the gap with a “roadmap” whose first implementation update is due in Antalya.

This year the chequebook is staying shut. An internal EU document seen by Reuters says there is “no scope” for new climate funding commitments at COP31. Instead, Brussels will push a “mitigation package” to turn countries’ existing pledges into real-world emission cuts. In other words: deliver on your promises, but don’t expect us to pay for it.

The EU also wants to globalise the “Just Transition Mechanism” agreed in principle at Belém, modelled on its own scheme for Europe’s coal regions: in effect, a fund for the oil, gas and coal workers to be put out of work while the world “transitions” to renewables. But at the Bonn talks in June, as the African Group demanded grants, Britain insisted the mechanism “is not about finance”. A just transition with no money attached is a slogan, not a mechanism.

Why the sudden parsimony? Trump’s counter-revolution has shut the biggest spigot of all. Antalya is the first COP since America’s second exit from the Paris Agreement took effect, on January 27th 2026, and the White House has announced its withdrawal from the UN Framework Convention itself, the first nation ever to do so. Washington no longer merely abstains from globalist schemes but blocks them, as when its diplomats, with Saudi Arabia, got the International Maritime Organisation to defer its global carbon levy on shipping last year.

Europe cannot fill the gap. The collective West, minus Trump’s America, is itself running on empty: Britain and France are weighed down by massive debts and deficits, Germany is emerging from years of stagnation amid high energy costs and deindustrialisation, and NATO members have pledged to raise defence and security spending to 5% of GDP by 2035. Money spent on tanks and air defences cannot also be spent on solar farms in Africa. For decades, climate finance has been a game of bootleggers and Baptists: pledge allegiance to the cause and collect the grants. Developing countries were always going to put their citizens’ legitimate aspirations ahead of Western demands to forgo the fossil fuels that made the West rich, a form of climate colonialism that Africa’s leaders have increasingly rejected.

Martyrs, campaigners and scapegoats

With Australia holding the gavel, the small island states will again take centre stage, fresh from a Pacific pre-COP and its Taku Pakasoa Declaration. Rupert Darwall, whose new book I recently reviewed, has dissected the role of these “climate martyrs” and their disappearing islands, a staple of every COP. Inconveniently, a 2018 study found that Tuvalu’s land area actually grew by 2.9% between 1971 and 2014.

As usual at the COP carnivals, the NGOs and their media allies will be out in force. After wildfires near Antalya in September, 350.org demanded that Turkey announce a coal phase-out timeline before the summit. For the campaigners, the spoilers of recent COPs are easy to name: a US President who calls climate change a “hoax” and the ‘defeatism’ of Bill Gates, whose U-turn on climate catastrophism gave the game away. That voters and Asian power planners have simply weighed the costs and found Net Zero wanting is not a possibility they entertain.

That leaves Europe and Britain as the last true believers, still preaching the gospel of climate leadership to a congregation that has largely left the church.

COP31, yet another damp squib?

What, then, should we expect from Antalya? A clutch of voluntary pledges; a “roadmap” that nobody is obliged to follow; a “just transition” mechanism without the money to make it work. Plenty of solemn warnings about overshoot, and rather less said about the coal demand records, the gas-fired data centres, the Ceyhan pipeline plans and the Queensland mine extensions. The 100,000 participants will fly home, and the world’s energy system will carry on much as before, governed by the arithmetic of cost, reliability and security rather than the theology of climate conferences.

This article was first published in the Daily Sceptic https://dailysceptic.org/2026/11/06/at-cop31-even-the-un-is-giving-up/

Dr Tilak K. Doshi is the Daily Sceptic’s Energy Editor. He is an economist, a member of the CO2 Coalition and a former (cancelled) contributor to Forbes. Follow him on Substack and X.

Australia- EU deal with climate shackles is not a free trade agreement

So, the EU wants a free trade agreement but only if they can slap trade sanctions on us if we breach the Net Zero “Paris Agreement” rules. Righto. We only sell about 6% of our saleable stuff to the EU, and for a small gain in that, we’re going to let them lock us into rules about energy production that affect the other 94%?  Worse, we’ve been thinking about this absurd demand for months and no one in the government has figured out how to say, “Not on your life”.

Flags of the European Union and Australia merged together, displaying their blue backgrounds with stars and the Union Jack.
Waving flag of Australia and

From CFACT

By CFACT Ed

Just because the EU calls it a free trade deal doesn’t mean it is one

So, the EU wants a free trade agreement but only if they can slap trade sanctions on us if we breach the Net Zero “Paris Agreement” rules. Righto. We only sell about 6% of our saleable stuff to the EU, and for a small gain in that, we’re going to let them lock us into rules about energy production that affect the other 94%?  Worse, we’ve been thinking about this absurd demand for months and no one in the government has figured out how to say, “Not on your life”.

Half of Australia don’t want to pay a single dollar for Net Zero, we could just as easily turf the Paris agreement tomorrow and the Labor Party want to make it harder to do that?

Free trade supposedly means we can buy and sell goods without taxes, regulations, subsidies, and limits, but the EU’s version comes with requirements that we tax, regulate and limit the emissions that apply not just to our exports to them but in every single export we make to every other country. What kind of Communist mental disorder do they have?

So, we gain a bit more trade with the EU at the expense of paying more for energy which makes all our exports to every other country less competitive? (And our domestic energy more expensive too?)

The EU deal with Climate Shackles is not a Free Trade Agreement. If they wanted to buy our green steel, they would be welcome to, yet they are saying they want to buy our green steel but all the other steel we sell to everyone else has to be greenish too, even if our other customers don’t care. (Obviously this is just a hypothetical example, since almost no one on Earth wants to buy green steel).

And the irony is that while the EU seeks to dragoon us into the Paris Agreement, the largest single export we send to the EU is coal. The EU buys almost 20 million tons of our metallurgical coal to make steel in their last surviving smelters.

Greg Sheridan carries a warning in The Australian that the EU deal on free trade is undemocratic:

Profoundly undemocratic: Coalition warned against ratifying EU free-trade agreement over net zero

It would be a tremendous mistake, seriously against the national interest, if Angus Taylor’s Liberal-Nationals Coalition allows itself to be bullied into voting to ratify the Australia-European Union free-trade agreement.

To do so would undermine its political program, destroy its credibility and contribute to the enfeeblement of Australian government and democracy.

In net-zero targets and industrial relations, the FTA fundamentally undermines our democracy by imposing legally binding commitments on future governments. It’s a profoundly undemocratic agreement, proceeding from two essentially anti-democratic impulses, which are part of the DNA of both the EU and the Albanese government.

This is a question of sovereignty. We could become a little non-voting vassal state of the EU. No control, just punishment if we disobey.

This will mean the EU gets it octopus suckers on our national policy decisions, and we may never get away

This agreement will have all kinds of pacifying caveats about how we can leave anytime, and how they recognize our sovereignty, which will mean nothing. At the end of the day as soon as the trade deal opens a new sliver of market, our farmers and small businesses will take out loans to expand operations and we’re as good as locked in perpetuity, or until the EU shafts us some other way.

Once the money is on the table for machinery, staff, land, and processing plants, the EU can use our small business pain as leverage to make us behave. Nice business you’ve got there. Be a shame if something happened to it. Now, how many Volkswagen ID.4s can we put you down for?

If Australia tried to leave the Net Zero shackles the EU just has to mention adding on trade sanctions again and all these businesses are pushed to the wall. The Labor government probably likes it that way (because small businesses don’t vote for Labor) and Labor wouldn’t back out of a multinational regulatory bomb anyway. But the Liberals and Nationals will feel that pain as their natural voters want them to leave the deal, and their business donors beg them to stay in the whole EU.

The EU might not need to impose a single tariff. The credible possibility of retaliation will influence Australian policy.

And farmers might think they can just ignore the EU market, but the EU market won’t ignore them. Since EU imports will be arriving and competing for market space in Australia, in a sense, Australian farmers will be forced to expand to the EU. Running to stand still…

Fake “Free trade” is a handy disguise for a Globalist move

Even Mathias Cormann, head of the OECD, gets in on the game of lecturing us about “free trade” even though this is patently unfree, and telling us we must choose “openness” which means being open to the EU bossing us around. We supposedly need to run from the poison of “populism”, which sounds a lot like someone in Paris arrogantly dismissing 30% of Australian voters. So much for the OECD “commitment to democracy”?

Our former Minister of Finance has apparently, emigrated from Australia and moved to Blob-Land. As secretary general of the OECD his first allegiance now is the larval One World Government that pays his salary.

Finally, since Malcolm Turnbull wants us to pass the EU free trade deal we know it’s a bomb.

‘Come into my parlour little guy’
Said the E.U. spider to the A.U. fly,
‘ And don’t be afraid,
To join our free trade,
And give our Net Zero a try.’

— Ruairi

This article originally appeared at JoNova

US Unshackles Its Power Plants; Poor Nations Must Do the Same

When the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) officially tore up its greenhouse gas limits, the agency put reliable energy ahead of climate ideology.
Governments around the globe surrendered their energy choices to a system built on United Nations climate negotiations, prerequisites for financing arrangements and foreign aid, and net zero targets. International agencies with globalist yearnings decided which power plants could be built, which fuels could be used, and which technologies received political favor.

Governments around the globe surrendered their energy choices to a system built on United Nations climate negotiations, prerequisites for financing arrangements and foreign aid, and net zero targets. International agencies with globalist yearnings decided which power plants could be built, which fuels could be used, and which technologies received political favor.

A vibrant illustration highlighting energy poverty in poor nations, featuring people expressing hope for more energy access. The background shows a power plant with smokestacks, coal, and natural gas symbols, along with slogans advocating for energy freedom and employment.
AL generated by ChatGPT

From CO2 Coalition

By Vijay Jayaraj

The United States has unshackled power plants from politically driven emission regulations that held them hostage for decades, eventually forcing many facilities to close. When the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) officially tore up its greenhouse gas limits, the agency put reliable energy ahead of climate ideology.

So far, the silence from the capitals of developing nations is deafening. National leaders across Africa, Asia, and Latin America sit mute in the face of this massive shift to rational energy policy.

For years, these leaders blamed Western pressure for their refusal to build infrastructure for the use of coal and natural gas. Now, the largest economy on Earth has abandoned destructive emission restrictions, yet the economies that most need such relief continue to bow before the global climate cartel to the detriment of their own citizens.

The history of human progress is inseparable from abundant energy. Coal powered industrialization. Oil enabled mass transport, modern agriculture, and global trade. Natural gas brought dependable heat and electricity to households and factories. These fossil fuels increased production, reduced physical hardship, improved public health, and made once-exclusive technologies available to ordinary people.

Between 1990 and 2016, the share of humanity with electricity climbed from 71% to 87%, and South Asia doubled to 86% the number of people having this service, which much of the West has long taken for granted. Over a 20-year period in India, an index that measures monetary poverty and access to education and basic services collapsed from 55% of the population suffering such deprivation to 16%, while access to clean cooking fuel rose from 22% to 68%.

Disrupting this remarkable progress driven by hydrocarbons was not a natural calamity or a resource crunch, but the political ideology of a fabricated climate crisis.

Governments around the globe surrendered their energy choices to a system built on United Nations climate negotiations, prerequisites for financing arrangements and foreign aid, and net zero targets. International agencies with globalist yearnings decided which power plants could be built, which fuels could be used, and which technologies received political favor.

Getting Rid of Unscientific Policy Barriers

The EPA of the current administration understands how the climate regime has undermined American energy security. It now says that the U.S. Clean Air Act cannot authorize power plant regulation based on climate change. The larger economic point needs no courtroom: When a rule makes dependable generation harder to finance, build, or operate, it raises the price of every activity that depends on electricity.

The arithmetic is simple: Emissions are a global quantity, a single nation’s power sector is a rounding error within it, and the supposed health benefits of shuttering that sector are too remote and too speculative to justify the certain, measurable damage of expensive electricity.

That reasoning now resides in an American federal rulemaking. It has been the central point of climate realists for years, and although dismissed by alarmists as denial, it has arrived at the policy table.

This is why the phrase “energy transition” sounds detached from reality in the developing world.

A transition from what to what?

A villager who burns wood is not transitioning away from a modern grid. A factory owner facing daily blackouts is not choosing between two equally dependable technologies. A hospital running on diesel during outages is not making a lifestyle statement. These people need more power, delivered at a price they can pay, from every source capable of producing it.

The American energy reset is an exit from climate imperialism and an entrée to greater freedom to pursue prosperity. After appeasing ministers of international climate commitments for years, leaders of developing countries who do not seize this opportunity betray their people and invite political backlash.

Originally published at American Greatness, October 1, 2026.

Vijay Jayaraj is a Science and Research Associate at the CO2 Coalition, Fairfax, Virginia. He holds an M.S. in environmental sciences from the University of East Anglia and a postgraduate degree in energy management from Robert Gordon University, both in the U.K., and a bachelor’s in engineering from Anna University, India. He served as a research associate with the Changing Oceans Research Unit at University of British Columbia, Canada.

Energy future: Made in China by coal

The stark reality: in China, 55% of power is produced by coal and the cost of household electricity is 8 cents per kWh.

Electricity is the sine qua non of modern society.

Coal-based electricity brought the U.S. to the center of the world’s economic stage and China has followed that same pathway to modernity and societal progress.

From CFACT

BY FRANK CLEMENTE AND FRED PALMER:

The stark reality: in China, 55% of power is produced by coal and the cost of household electricity is 8 cents per kWh. In the UK, coal’s percentage of electricity was 30% in 2010 but that has declined to less than 1%. Consequently, the cost of electricity for families has increased 250% — from 16 cents to over 40 cents per kWh — and is still on the rise. No wonder 37% of England’s families pay over 10% of their income on energy.

In the U.S., the closing of coal plants for political reasons has led to coal’s role declining from 45% in 2010 to just 15% today. Accordingly, the cost of electricity increased 70% to 19 cents per kWh and is projected to keep rising: “Retail electricity prices have increased faster than the rate of inflation since 2022, and we expect them to continue increasing” — U.S. Department of Energy.

Moreover, after the closure of over 300 coal plants, reliability is at serious risk in the U.S.: “coal-fired generator retirements… have caused a sharp decline in anticipated resources … new generation is insufficient to make up for generator retirements and load growth.”  — North American Electricity Reliability Corporation (NERC)

Electricity is the sine qua non of modern society.  

In 2000, the National Academy of Engineering identified electrification as the greatest engineering achievement of the 20th Century.

Coal- based electricity brought the U.S. to the center of the world’s economic stage and China has followed that same pathway to modernity and societal progress. In 2000, coal produced about 990 Terawatt Hours (TWh) of electricity in China. By 2025, coal produced upwards of 6,000 TWh.

This dramatic rise in coal power stimulated massive improvements in the quality of life of the population. In 2000, the Infant Mortality Rate in China was 30, it is now 5. Access to clean cooking fuels increased from 41% of the population to well over 90%. Availability of clean water grew from 45% of households to 99%.

Life expectancy rose from 72 to 78, and the Food Production Index grew from 63 to over 112.

No wonder the International Energy Agency (IEA) declared: “Coal has underpinned China’s massive and unprecedented growth in output, fueling an economic miracle.”

The growth of the middle class in China is the largest the world has ever seen, increasing from 39 million people in 2000 to almost 1 billion today.  The middle class is the backbone of any society and coal-

based electricity was the material foundation for this progress in China. In 2000, electricity use per capita was 993 kWh, it is now over 7,400 — far more than Germany. In essence, through the benefits of coal-based electricity, China, with over 1.4 billion people, became a modern nation in a little more than two decades. Since 2000, over 70% of humans lifted out of poverty were Chinese.

Coal made the difference and propelled China to ever higher in the World’s socio- economic hierarchy.

China imports about 550 million metric tons of coal per year. These imports, along with its own substantial supply, have provided the energy to make China the world’s leading manufacturer and exporter.

China produces over one billion tons of steel — 54% of global production, of which over 90% is produced using coal. China provides 52% of cement, 97% of which uses coal energy. China produces 80% of the world’s solar panels and coal provides at least 75% of the electricity for their manufacture.

By 2030, China’s coal to gas capacity will grow from 9.4 billion cubic meters to 28 billion. The world’s policymakers need to be mindful of their dependence on China’s use of coal and the benefits that have spread across the globe.

And now China has built an electricity system for the next leap forward. The PRC is basing its electric supply on a foundation of coal — a fuel that has demonstrated abundance, availability, affordability and reliability. By 2030, China will have over 1,500 GW of coal-based electricity compared to the DOE projection of a mere 88 GW in the U.S.

The idea that intermittent wind and solar will replace coal power in generation or manufacturing in China is wishful thinking indeed. Over 500 GW of coal capacity is already under development compared to an insignificant 4 GW in the U.S.

And these are not your grandfather’s coal plants. Rather, China is building advanced stations that produce significantly lower emissions. As Clare Richardson of the National Bureau of Asian Research pointed out: “China is rapidly deploying ultra-supercritical and supercritical coal technology, which can operate at higher temperatures and pressures to improve thermal efficiency.”

The country has also pursued widespread adoption of flue gas desulfurization and selective catalytic reduction systems to cut sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions.

Consider, for example, Pingshan Phase II in Anhui Province, a cutting-edge 1.35-GW ultra-supercritical coal-fired unit with a net efficiency of about 50% — making it the world’s most efficient coal-fired power plant and a continuing model for the ongoing wave of plants under construction not only in China but also India and the rest of the world. China is the architect of 21St Century coal power.

There is widespread recognition that progress in Artificial Intelligence (AI) will determine a large part of a nation’s future. RAND Corporation projects countries will see their influence rise or fall depending on how they manage the development of AI.

Scholars at the University of Miami School of Law concluded: “The global race for AI dominance is shaping the future of economies, governance, and national security.” Finally, this cogent comment from Arab News: “Artificial Intelligence is no longer just a technological breakthrough: it is quickly becoming a linchpin of global power.”

Thus, the race is on and now we consider the realities: The U.S. aspires to global dominance in AI. In July of last year, the White House published: Winning the Race: America’s AI Action Plan as well as three executive orders designed to promote and maintain leadership in AI. But China has the same aspiration. Through a series of Five-Year Plans, China has become a formidable technological competitor of the U.S.

As The New York Times put it: China Is Spending Billions to Become an A.I. Superpower.

The competition between the U.S. and China is intense and China is steadily eroding the initial gap. In 2023, the Stanford AI Index reported the performance gap between U.S. and Chinese model benchmarks was about 25%. By 2026, that gap has narrowed to 3% and is closing further. Daniel Hook, CEO at Digital Science, found that China is now ahead in the development of large language models with an AI talent pool that dwarfs its rivals — 30,000 active AI researchers and a massive graduate student and postdoctoral population.

China has filed at least 70% of all global AI related patents and leads on research article volume with 23 % of all global AI publications versus 13 % for the U.S. And the American talent pool is diminishing. The number of AI researchers moving to the U.S. has dropped 89% since 2017. The U.S. is ahead today, but the momentum belongs to China.

No country will meet its AI goals without reliable and affordable electricity. The U.S. is increasingly falling behind on both fronts. Consider the PJM Interconnection with 67 million customers in the East. Due to the closure of coal generating capacity, the reserve margin for the system will continue to fall from 23% in 2020 to a risky 14% in 2027. Incredibly, utilities in the PJM system are planning to retire over 11 more GW of coal. Hard to believe.

The U.S. has been closing coal plants willy-nilly for over a decade with nary a thought to the implications. Yet the consequences of higher rates and reduced reliability are real and meaningful to the competition between China and the U.S. — and will be even more so as India’s 1.5 billion coal-based population enters the AI picture — India’s electricity is 70% coal.

“The difference in the cost of energy around the world is going to become really quite extreme,” Michael Brown, global investment strategist at Franklin Templeton, told CNBC. “If you’re making energy-intensive investments, then you’re going to go to where the cheapest energy is.”

In terms of rates, U.S. household power prices have risen nearly 25% in just four years. In 2025-26 a total of 47 states endured electricity price increases and dozens of additional rate increase requests are still pending.

The American people are increasingly victims of an array of poor energy policy decisions at both the Federal and state level — and even utilities themselves have failed to think ahead, closing productive coal plants to get in on the government dole of “renewables” like expensive wind and solar.

Families suffer, businesses suffer and the next generation of Americans will pay a heavy price with a diminishing role on the world’s economic stage.

Note: Coal is the Cornerstone seeks to give a voice to supporters of coal in its many dimensions and contributions. But we need help and ask like-minded individuals and companies to help support the effort at http://www.coaliscornerstone.com. Access to our previous articles is available on this site.

This article originally appeared at RealClear Energy

Fred Palmer Esq. has served as CEO of Western Fuels and Peabody Energy’s Senior Vice President for Government Affairs. He chaired the World Coal Association Board and was a member of the National Coal Council. He received the American Institute of Mining Award for “Distinguished Achievement in Coal Technology.” He also was awarded a Statement of Appreciation from the National Coal Council in 2015 with a plaque for “Guidance since 1990”

Frank Clemente PhD. specializes in the socio-economic impact of energy policy and is author of The Global Value of Coal published by the International Energy Agency (IEA) as well as numerous articles in energy journals and reports for the National Coal Council. Professor Clemente has served on the faculty at the University of Kentucky, the University of Wisconsin and Penn State. His work is presented independently from any University affiliation. 

Nuclear waste storage ….. no big deal

Nuclear power will be the future.

There is no doubt about it.

Nuclear is the cleanest, greenest, cheapest, safest, energy source ever.

There is no doubt about that, no matter what anyone says.

From CFACT

By Kelvin Kemm

Nuclear power will be the future. There is no doubt about it. Nuclear is the cleanest, greenest, cheapest, safest, energy source ever. There is no doubt about that, no matter what anyone says. Also, just look at the energy density of sugar, coal, petrol, and uranium. Sugar contains about 20 megajoules per kilogram, coal 25, petrol 50, but uranium is 76,000,000. What this tells you is that you can carry your lifetime supply of electricity in a shopping packet, if you’re carrying uranium.

Let us face it, coal is going to be a primary energy source of the world for years to come. Stopping coal use is like shooting yourself in both feet with a machine gun. As time passes, rather rapidly, there’s no doubt that coal will give way to nuclear, for purely economic reasons. Certainly nothing to do with the myth of anthropogenic CO2 causing increased global warming. Meanwhile the Chinese are building new coal plants faster than the Western world is decommissioning theirs. The Chinese know what they are doing, and they are chasing their goal… of economic dominance.

Don’t burn banknotes

As coal gives way to nuclear power in the production of electricity, we should not stop using coal, but we should no longer burn it. Coal is composed of very valuable chemicals, so why burn them? Burning coal is something like burning banknotes instead of wood, to keep warm.

In South Africa we have the SASOL Company, which converts coal to petrol and diesel. About 1/3 of South Africa’s petrol and diesel comes from coal. The coal chemicals are also used to produce ladies’ cosmetics, aspirin, high-quality waxes, and more.

The ultimate answer is to use small nuclear reactors to drive the coal conversion plants.

The world’s consumption of electricity doubled over the past 25 years, and is set to double again in the next 25. In fact, it will double faster because more people are getting connected to electricity, and more and more electrical devices are coming into existence. So, forget about green extremist goals of reducing world energy consumption.

The most sensible route for doubling electricity consumption, on a world scale, is via nuclear. Electricity consumption is directly proportional to GDP, which in turn directly affects the take-home pay of citizens. Citizen wealth changes the nature of society.

Another Revolution is coming

Cast your mind back to the Industrial Revolution, of around 1760 to 1840. Abundant coal was linked to the development of steam engines, and iron production. Energy and engines led to deeper mining, mass textile production, and a host of other advances. So, the Industrial Revolution burst onto the scene and changed the world. A large adoption of nuclear power, together with AI, electronics, and massive scientific development will also change the world.

But let us return to nuclear, and the relentless anti-nuclear campaigns waged by the slogan-chanting greenies. One of their themes is; ‘what about the nuclear waste?’

Nuclear waste is no problem. Really. If you want a good night’s sleep, you can take a sleeping pill. If you take the entire bottle of pills, you will sleep really well, and never wake up. But people don’t usually do stupid things like that. Yes, without doubt a lot of nuclear radiation will kill you, if you are stupid. But small amounts of nuclear radiation are perfectly safe. Large amounts of nuclear radiation are also safe, when handled by professionals in a professional manner.

Why do the public somehow think that the Army can handle artillery ammunition in a safe, professional way, but somehow professional nuclear engineers can’t handle radioactive materials?

Does the Glacier worry you?

The radiation of concern is called Gamma radiation. It ‘shines’ like a light. Gamma rays are exactly the same as light, radio waves, X-Rays, or microwaves in the kitchen microwave oven. But the Gammas carry more energy than X-Rays, and so they can cause harm. The kitchen microwaves are safely contained inside the ‘box’ which is the microwave oven. When a radioactive object is put into a lead box the Gammas are safely contained in the box, and you can safely sit next to it and eat your lunch.

For long-term storage you put the box underground, and leave it there. Note that by international convention, no nuclear waste is ever dumped or thrown away. It is stored, like the gold bars at Fort Knox. The principle is that you can move the radioactive material at any time in the future. So, worrying about a glacier advancing in 100,000 years’ time is silly. When you see the glacier coming you have decades to move all your boxes.

A highly useful property of all radioactive materials is that they constantly advertise their presence. It is like a cricket in his hole in the lawn. His chirping tells you where he is. With a Geiger counter, even a radioactive pinhead is easy to find in your lawn. It calls you. But a lump of Arsenic is extremely difficult to find, because it hides. There is arsenic in advanced solar panels, but nobody panics about that.

Insignificant volumes

One huge advantage of nuclear is that there is so little nuclear fuel, so the resulting spent fuel is extremely small, unlike coal ash. The spent fuel is called High Level Waste (HLW). It is the really dangerous material, if you walk up to it. Then there is Intermediate Level Waste (ILW), which is things like pumps, pipes, and so on, which had radioactive material flowing through them. Finally, there is Low Level Waste (LLW) which is paper towels, lab coats, and items which were used in a radiation designated area, and could conceivably have some radioactive dust on them. All of these categories are packaged into drums and safely stored underground.

Nuclear waste is better handled than any other waste in the world. This is a positive spin-off legacy from all the exaggerated scare stories which have been generated by the anti-nuke lobby.

Nuclear people worldwide are very proud of what they do, and how they do it, and they do it well.

The big scare which has always been splashed in news media is if something explodes, then some of the radioactive material can be reduced to dust and scattered into the atmosphere. It then acts like any other dust, and blows with the wind, and then settles out. But remember the crickets in the lawn. If it were not radioactive you would not know where the dust was. You would not even know it was there. But even the dust ‘chirps’ its presence, and so the ‘chirp’ can be used to scare the public. Note that during the infamous Fukushima incident, not one single person was killed or injured by nuclear radiation. Yet the popular news was full of scary stories of radiation spreading everywhere.

The nuclear waste repositories of the world are all perfectly able to safely store any radioactive material for centuries, just like Fort Knox stores its gold.

Dr Kelvin Kemm is a South African nuclear physicist who has been a CFACT Senior Advisor for over two decades. He is Chairman of Stratek Holdings, a nuclear project management company, and is past Chairman of the South African Nuclear Energy Corporation (Necsa). He has given both Congressional and Senate briefings in Washington DC. He has been guest speaker at over 20 US

Coal remains the undisputed king of global power generation

The loss of LNG supplies through the Strait of Hormuz drove up gas prices in Europe and Asia massively.

As a result, coal generation is now expected to rise slightly (~1.4%) in 2026 rather than fall, while gas-fired output stays roughly flat

AI generated by Grok

This claim holds based on the latest IEA figures and the Oilprice.com article (Charles Kennedy, August 19, 2026).

According to the IEA’s Electricity Mid-Year Update 2026 (which the article draws on), coal-fired generation is forecast at 10,974 TWh in 2026—nearly one-third of global electricity production (total around 33,313 TWh).

That makes coal the single largest source by a wide margin:

  • Natural gas: ~6,976 TWh
  • Hydropower: ~4,536 TWh
  • Solar: ~3,289 TWh
  • Wind: ~2,898 TWh
  • Nuclear: ~2,871 TWh

Coal is expected to generate nearly as much as gas and hydro combined and about 77% more than wind and solar combined.

All renewables collectively (hydro, solar, wind, bioenergy, geothermal and other) are set to overtake coal for the first time in 2026 (renewables ~11,627 TWh).

No individual renewable source comes close to coal, however.

The IEA still projects coal to remain the largest single source through at least 2030, even as its share gradually declines and total renewable output grows faster (roughly 8% plus in 2026).

The IEA had earlier expected a modest decline in coal generation for 2026.

Higher natural-gas prices, linked to disruptions in LNG supplies through the Strait of Hormuz amid the ongoing conflict involving Iran, have made coal more competitive for fuel-switching in parts of Asia and Europe.

The loss of LNG supplies through the Strait of Hormuz drove up gas prices in Europe and Asia massively.

As a result, coal generation is now expected to rise slightly (~1.4%) in 2026 rather than fall, while gas-fired output stays roughly flat.

China (still generating more than half of the world’s coal power) and India remain the dominant drivers.

Rapid renewable build-out is meeting a large share of new demand growth, but absolute coal output stays very high because overall electricity demand is rising strongly (IEA forecasts ~3.6% global demand growth in 2026).

In short: wind and solar continue their record expansion, and the broader renewable category is overtaking coal this year.

Yet coal’s absolute scale and dispatchable role keep it the clear leader among individual sources for the foreseeable near term.

China is the world’s largest coal consumer, accounting for more than half of global demand (roughly 4.9–5.0 billion tonnes in recent years).

Its coal use shapes global markets. Demand has been roughly flat in 2025 and is expected to be stable-to-slightly higher in 2026, with a likely peak and slow decline later in the decade.

Power Generation (Dominant Driver: ~60–70% of Total Coal Use)

This is by far the largest and most dynamic segment.

  • Strong electricity demand growth remains the core structural driver. China’s power demand is growing ~5–5.5% in 2026 (after ~5% in 2025), driven by:
    • Industrial activity and manufacturing (still the biggest slice of demand).
    • Residential and commercial cooling (air conditioning surges during heatwaves; El Niño is amplifying this in 2026).
    • Electrification trends: electric vehicles, data centers/AI, and some process heat.
  • Renewables are growing extremely fast (record solar and wind additions), and coal’s share of generation has fallen (below 50% in H1 2026 for the first time). However, absolute coal-fired generation can still rise when demand outpaces clean supply, wind resources are weak, curtailment is high, or hydro underperforms.
  • In 2025, coal power generation declined modestly (~1–1.5%) for the first time in a decade because renewables, hydro and nuclear covered nearly all demand growth. In 2026 it is rebounding (estimates of +1.5–3%), partly due to weaker wind conditions, higher curtailment of renewables, and reduced gas-fired generation amid elevated LNG prices linked to Middle East disruptions.
  • Coal plants increasingly serve as flexible capacity for peak demand and grid stability rather than pure baseload, supported by new capacity additions (tens of GW still coming online) and long-term power contracts that reserve significant generation for coal.

Industrial Demand (Non-Power: ~30–40%)

Trends here are mixed and partially offsetting:

  • Steel (metallurgical/coking coal) — Soft-to-declining. Real estate weakness and slower infrastructure growth have reduced pig iron and crude steel output. Gradual shifts toward electric arc furnaces (scrap-based) also reduce coking coal needs over time.
  • Cement and building materials — Clear structural decline. Cement production has been falling for years due to the property market correction and maturing urbanization.
  • Coal-to-chemicals — Strong growth and a key offsetting factor. China is expanding coal-to-olefins, coal-to-methanol, fertilizers, and other chemicals. This supports energy security by substituting domestic coal for imported oil and gas feedstocks. It has helped keep overall industrial coal demand relatively stable even as steel and cement weaken.

Other Drivers

  • Energy security and policy — Coal is viewed as the most reliable domestic fuel. The ongoing Middle East conflict and LNG supply risks have reinforced this preference. Official policy aims for a coal consumption peak before 2030 under the “dual carbon” goals but prioritizes security and allows new flexible coal capacity. The latest five-year plan for coal emphasizes controlled development rather than rapid phase-down.
  • Weather and seasonal factors — Extreme heat or cold, drought (affecting hydro), or poor wind conditions quickly increase coal burn for power and heating.
  • Domestic supply dynamics — China produces the vast majority of the coal it consumes. Safety inspections (e.g., in Shanxi) can temporarily tighten supply and affect prices/imports, but overall production capacity remains ample.

Summary Outlook

DriverDirection (2025–2026)Relative ImportanceNotes
Electricity demandStrong growthVery HighIndustry + cooling + electrification
Renewables expansionVery strongHigh (offsets coal)Share falling, but absolute coal can still rise
Coal-to-chemicalsGrowingMedium-HighKey industrial offset
Steel & cementDecliningMediumStructural (property market)
Energy security / policySupportive of coalHighReinforced by geopolitics
WeatherVariable (heat/wind/hydro)Medium (short-term)Can swing annual numbers

Rising electricity demand is the primary force keeping Chinese coal demand high.

Rapid renewable growth is reducing coal’s share and limiting absolute growth, but has not yet produced sustained large declines in volume because of the sheer scale of new power needs, intermittency challenges, and the strategic role of coal for reliability and chemicals.

Most analysts expect Chinese coal demand to plateau near current levels and begin a gradual decline later this decade, though the exact timing depends on electricity demand growth, renewable integration success, and industrial restructuring.

Indonesia and India Are Jointly Planning a Hydrocarbon-Powered Future

Both countries are moving deeper into manufacturing, and both must serve an upwardly mobile middle class.

That means more electricity, more refined fuels, more petrochemicals, more steel, more freight, and more industrial heat. It also means more coal, oil, gas, and nuclear power – energy sources that can deliver reliable, affordable power.

The CO2 Coalition

By Vijay Jayaraj

A millennium ago, India’s Chola Kingdom commanded the seas of Southeast Asia, forming with the Indonesian archipelago deep mercantile and cultural roots and a shared economic destiny that lasted for hundreds of years. In the 21st century, these two giants are again engaging in complementary roles on the global stage.

India is the world’s most populous nation, and Indonesia the fourth. Together, they represent 1.8 billion people intent on basic survival, industrial growth, and ascending the global economic ladder.

Both countries are moving deeper into manufacturing, and both must serve an upwardly mobile middle class. That means more electricity, more refined fuels, more petrochemicals, more steel, more freight, and more industrial heat. It also means more coal, oil, gas, and nuclear power – energy sources that can deliver reliable, affordable power.

The need for fossil fuels took center stage when Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto met in Jakarta to forge deeper economic ties July 7. At the top of their agenda sat a massive expansion of energy trade and an Indian request for more Indonesian coal to feed a ravenous power grid.

This is a logical arrangement in a fast-growing industrial relationship. Bilateral trade has grown more than fivefold since 2005, from less than $5 billion to nearly $25 billion. India remains Indonesia’s second-largest buyer of coal and the biggest importer of Indonesian crude palm oil, while also sourcing minerals, rubber, hydrocarbons, pulp, and paper. In return, India supplies refined petroleum products, vehicles, telecom equipment, steel products, and agricultural goods.

The Steel Authority of India and Indonesia’s Krakatau Steel just agreed to a joint venture for making stainless steel in Indonesia. Around 90% of India’s primary steel output still depends on coal. Indonesia’s steel industry is similarly coal-dependent, with almost 80% of production relying on the fuel.

Indonesian Energy and Mineral Resources Minister Bahlil Lahadalia reported that India has expressed interest in participating in Indonesia’s oil and gas sector. Once one of the largest producers of gas in the world, Indonesia recently awarded multiple exploration contracts to international oil firms.

The two governments discussed cooperating on peaceful nuclear projects. Like fossil fuels, nuclear power offers dependable baseload electricity that the intermittent sources of solar and wind cannot match.

Both sides also signed multiple agreements on critical minerals and supply chain technology, medical product regulation, disaster management, telecommunications, and agriculture.

Rejecting Green Dogma, Tackling Energy Poverty

Recent rolling blackouts in Sumatra and Java exposed severe vulnerabilities in the national electricity system. State utility PLN openly admitted that constrained coal supplies were responsible for Java’s crippling outages. It is impossible to grow a manufacturing hub on solar and wind, which are subject to the whims of weather.

Faced with the catastrophe of energy starvation, Indonesia is rejecting green propaganda. Jakarta delayed its timeline for retiring coal-fired power plants. In December 2025, the government quietly but firmly abandoned plans to close the Cirebon-1 plant.

India finds itself in the same boat and makes equally rational choices. Coal continues to generate nearly 80% of the country’s power. When severe weather devastated hydroelectric facilities across the subcontinent this year, India turned to coal as a substitute. India’s heavy reliance on coal is projected to continue well beyond 2047.

In a declaration of energy sovereignty, India withdrew a bid to host the 2028 United Nations climate summit. No amount of U.N.-inspired fearmongering will deter the mission to secure affordable energy for the Indian populace.

The India-Indonesia trade relationship is dismissing the apocalyptic fantasy of the climate industrial complex and committing to secure the energy sources that people need to improve their lives.

Originally published at The Hill, August 11, 2026.

Vijay Jayaraj is a Science and Research Associate at the CO2 Coalition, Fairfax, Virginia. He holds an M.S. in environmental sciences from the University of East Anglia and a postgraduate degree in energy management from Robert Gordon University, both in the U.K., and a bachelor’s in engineering from Anna University, India. He served as a research associate with the Changing Oceans Research Unit at University of British Columbia, Canada.

India To Climate Cartel: Count Us Out

Sometimes a story gets buried not because editors conspire against it, but because the news cycle has room for only one crisis at a time.

And that is the story of India’s explicit rejection of the global net zero movement.

From CO2 Coalition

By Vijay Jayaraj

Sometimes a story gets buried not because editors conspire against it, but because the news cycle has room for only one crisis at a time. This year the big news has been the Iran war. But even accounting for competing headlines, the silence around a genuinely consequential development is telling.

And that is the story of India’s explicit rejection of the global net zero movement. India has walked away from its bid to host the COP33 UN climate conference, and the world’s climate press has treated it as a footnote rather than the signal it is.

India had spent years projecting a rising voice in the development of climate policy, and hosting a COP33 is the closest thing the bureaucracy has to a coronation. Then, quietly, without public explanation, India withdrew its offer. No press conference. No elaboration. Just a government stepping back from a role for which it auditioned for years.

The truth is India has run the numbers on the cost of a net zero energy transition for a population of 1.4 billion climbing out of poverty, and it does not like what it sees. The notion that India should shackle its economy by adhering to restrictive climate policies, while its people still grapple with energy deficits, is illogical and morally indefensible.

Data India Doesn’t Need a Summit to See

Furthermore, the narrative of a rapidly degrading Indian environment due to energy consumption is demonstrably false. India’s own environmental indicators do not support the apocalyptic framing of the climate obsessed.

For years, hydrologists and climate modelers have relied on Himalayan snowfall estimates to forecast water availability for hundreds of millions of people across South Asia’s most fertile Ganges plains. Their projections of a seriously drier India, it turns out, were wrong.

A team of researchers, including scientists from the British Antarctic Survey, the U.K. Met Office, and Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, used frozen high-altitude lakes as natural pressure sensors rather than relying on undersized conventional rain gauges. What they found was startling: In a single winter, the best available snowfall models had underestimated seasonal snow over the Lake Hampta area of Himachal Pradesh by 37%. The peer-reviewed study makes clear that conventional instruments have been missing large volumes of snow for decades.

Then there is the vegetation story, which cuts even harder against the doom narrative. Researchers at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology modeled how India’s landscape would respond to a high-emissions future using the same family of computer models climate activists cite when warning of catastrophe.

The result was not desertification. It was the opposite. Gross primary production, a measure of how much carbon dioxide India’s forests, croplands, and other vegetation are absorbing, rose from roughly 729 grams of carbon per square meter annually in 1985 to about 830 by 2014 and is projected to nearly double to around 1,305 by the year 2100.

Layered onto that are the steady expansion of India’s forest cover over the past two decades and the recovering populations of endangered species such as tigers and Asiatic lions, successes resulting from conservation and habitat management rather than from decarbonization mandates.

All this means India has stopped outsourcing its environmental judgment to a U.N. process that treats every barrel of oil and every ton of coal as a moral affront, regardless of its benefit in lighting a clinic for children or powering a steel plant that employs thousands. A country that still has hundreds of millions of citizens without reliable access to electricity does not have the luxury of treating energy poverty as an acceptable trade-off for leadership in the climate industrial complex.

That is why India has expanded coal production and struck oil and gas deals with the United States and Persian Gulf producers. It has resisted binding emissions targets that would cap its own industrial growth, unwilling to commit to far-off targets for emission reductions. India’s relinquishment of COP33 hosting rights is perhaps the most visible expression of a strategic direction that has been building for years.

A country that the entire architecture of climate financing is supposedly built to help just declined to host the party. If climate summits worked as advertised, that would be unthinkable. But it is no longer, and pretending otherwise will not make the next withdrawal any less predictable.

Originally published at American Greatness, August 1, 2026.

Vijay Jayaraj is a Science and Research Associate at the CO2 Coalition, Fairfax, Virginia. He holds an M.S. in environmental sciences from the University of East Anglia and a postgraduate degree in energy management from Robert Gordon University, both in the U.K., and a bachelor’s in engineering from Anna University, India. He served as a research associate with the Changing Oceans Research Unit at University of British Columbia, Canada.

Energy Security and Climate Realism Usher in Coal’s Rise

Coal demand remains robust globally despite renewable growth and net-zero ambitions.

While headlines often emphasize a coal phase-out, data through 2025–2026 shows demand holding near record levels, driven by energy security priorities, economic growth in Asia, and pragmatic recognition that intermittent renewables cannot yet fully replace reliable, dispatchable power.

From The CO2 Coalition

By Vijay Jayaraj

Much of the global energy conversation still pretends that coal is on its way out. The pretense may be comforting to activists, investors, and policymakers who built their plans for a transition to so-called clean energy that never acknowledged the limitations of solar and wind power. However, the newest work by Lars Schernikau and Portia Roberts, The Coal Reality That Western Policy Ignores, shows the opposite: Coal is not being replaced, but rather being layered on top of everything else.

The data reveal that global coal consumption is accelerating. The appetite for reliable, baseload power drove usage to an unprecedented high of approximately 9 billion tons in 2025.

This volume represents more coal mined and burned than at any time in history, far outstripping levels recorded before the multi-trillion-dollar Western net-zero campaign. In 2025, China alone brought on-line 80 gigawatts of new coal-fired generation – enough to power 60 million households.

The Iran war’s disruption to supplies of liquefied natural gas has further boosted demand for coal as nations switched fuels for electricity production. This strategic imperative drove a massive surge in coal shipments across the Pacific. Bangladesh, Japan, the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan, and Vietnam immediately increased coal imports to avoid blackouts, with China and India leading the shift.

While alternative energy installations have expanded, coal utilization has grown right alongside them. The two asset classes are not locked in a zero-sum game but are growing to meet a voracious demand for electricity and industrial production.

The world’s proven reserves of coal – deposits that can be extracted economically utilizing current technologies – possess an operational runway of 130 to 150 years at today’s consumption rates. Taking into account remaining geological reserves, Earth holds enough anthracite and bituminous coal for many hundreds of years.

Schernikau and Roberts also remind readers that coal sits at the center of food security. Roughly a quarter of the world depends on fertilizers made with coal-derived ammonia. Abandon coal too quickly and you risk not only blackouts but also food production and, ultimately, lives.

This return to dependable solid fuels coincides with a long-overdue collapse of the pseudoscientific architecture that sustained for decades the narrative of a fabricated climate crisis. For years, scenarios of extreme weather based on flawed climate models were systematically weaponized by activist bureaucrats to demand the dismantling of a hydrocarbon economy.

The most prominent of these fabrications was Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5 (RCP 8.5), alongside its companion RCP 7.0. The international modeling consensus has formally abandoned these deceptions, confirming that RCP 8.5 is officially “implausible.” The apocalyptic scenarios used to terrorize the public and coerce financial markets were never rooted in real-world data.

The institutional framework designed to starve conventional energy sectors of investment capital is unraveling before our eyes. The corporate campaign for Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) compliance has had a severe global retrenchment. Global investment consortia, led by institutional giants like BlackRock, have quietly dismantled or significantly downgraded strict climate mandates. International banking groups and global aviation associations have canceled or rolled back aggressive net-zero timelines.

The fantasy of a rapid, painless transition away from hydrocarbons has run headfirst into physical laws and geopolitical necessities. Weather-dependent power technologies cannot run steel mills, operate heavy manufacturing, or secure domestic food supplies. The climate establishment can keep writing obituaries for coal, but the market keeps resurrecting it because there is no substitute for its scale, reliability, and availability.

Stop pretending that every rise in renewables implies a fall in coal. Stop using extreme scenarios to frighten the public into accepting policy mandates that do not fit the needs of growing economies. And stop telling developing nations that they must sacrifice dependable power in the name of predictive models that no longer command trust.

Originally published at PJ Media, July 15th, 2026.

Vijay Jayaraj is a Science and Research Associate at the CO2 Coalition, Fairfax, Virginia. He holds an M.S. in environmental sciences from the University of East Anglia and a postgraduate degree in energy management from Robert Gordon University, both in the U.K., and a bachelor’s in engineering from Anna University, India. He served as a research associate with the Changing Oceans Research Unit at University of British Columbia, Canada.

Britain: Time To Go Back To Coal

Among our “climate leader” jurisdictions, Britain is a serious contender for the top spot. Sure Germany got started earlier than Britain, with the so-called “Energiewende” going back to the 1990s; and upstart American states like California and New York each think that their own hair shirt energy restrictions should qualify them for the number one position.

From The Manhattan Contrarian

By Francis Menton

Among our “climate leader” jurisdictions, Britain is a serious contender for the top spot. Sure Germany got started earlier than Britain, with the so-called “Energiewende” going back to the 1990s; and upstart American states like California and New York each think that their own hair shirt energy restrictions should qualify them for the number one position.

But Britain’s suite of policies in the aggregate is hard to top: mandatory Net Zero goals set by statute; madcap buildout of wind and solar electricity generation; shuttering of generation from coal and natural gas; refusal to permit drilling in the North Sea; complete ban on fracking. The Energy Minister of the current Labour government — Ed Milliband — is as crazed a climate zealot as you can find anywhere. The British have even dynamited coal-fired power stations to be sure that nobody could ever change their minds about this Net Zero thing and try to re-start the plants.

Here from a post I did back in 2022, is a picture of the former Longannet coal plant in Fife, Scotland, getting dynamited to smithereens in 2021.

The last coal-fired electricity generation station in the UK closed in 2024. Today, the UK claims to get about 45-47% of its electricity from “renewables,” although that includes about 5-7% “biomass,” plus a small amount of hydro. The wind/solar contribution is around 35-40%. Milliband thinks he can further increase that percentage by just building more and more wind turbines and solar farms.

But unfortunately for the British, their wind and solar generation facilities seem to be subject to all going quiet at the same time, often inconveniently at the very hottest or coldest times of the year. Building more and yet more of them does not solve the problem. Some call this Britain’s “looming firm generation capacity crisis.”

So what’s the answer? How about doing the unthinkable — bring back coal!

On June 9, Andrew Montford, Director of Net Zero Watch, addressed this issue with his new Report “Thinking the Unthinkable: Coal Power and National Security.” (Full disclosure: I serve on the Board of the American affiliate of Net Zero Watch.). Here is the basic assumption underlying Andrew’s paper:

[T]he deteriorating state of the UK economy – unsustainably high electricity prices, low growth, deindustrialisation and a declining tax base – means that Net Zero and, along with it, carbon pricing, will be abandoned, no matter which party is in power.

I think that is clearly right. Reality has caught up with them. It is only a question of time until they are forced to abandon the Net Zero fantasy.

Andrew’s Report also focuses on the national security implications of unreliable electricity, with its inherent need for insecure backup from imports:

[I]mports and offshore production are both vulnerable to the actions of hostile powers, as the sabotage of the Nordstream pipeline in 2022 made clear. In this regard, the UK is horribly exposed. Nearly half of our gas supply comes from Norway. Sabotage of the Langeled pipeline, which alone brings around 20%, would be catastrophic for the UK, and would quickly lead to a civil emergency.

Is it even possible to raise the subject of coal power generation today in the UK, where that fuel has been subject to a decades-long campaign of vilification? Montford:

While such a step [i.e., reviving coal generation] was unthinkable just 12 months ago, the political landscape is moving quickly. Polling by More in Common has found that that ever-rising energy bills are causing political volatility and fragmentation. Italy and Germany have both recently announced the extension of the lives of their coal-fired power stations. As a result, new voices are being listened to. As a hint of just how far the Overton window has already moved, the Reform party’s manifesto for the Scottish elections featured a pledge to allow coal mining once again. It clear that the looming geopolitical threats to the country now mean that the time is ripe to reconsider the consensus against coal that has taken hold in the last two decades.

So all that is needed is a sufficiently imminent crisis to force the issue of coal generation back into the public conversation. The two short weeks since issuance of Andrew’s Report have brought to Britain some indicators of the dire corner it has backed itself into. Readers here probably know about the recent record-setting heat wave that has covered much of Europe, including Britain. Paul Homewood, of the Not a Lot of People Know That website, has a post on June 25, titled “No Wind? No Sun? What Could Possibly Go Wrong?” Homewood’s post includes extensive excerpts from a piece in the Telegraph from June 24 (behind paywall). The gist is that on June 23 the UK’s National Energy System Operator (NESO) had issued an emergency power supply warning, which was then withdrawn after NESO secured emergency supplies from the continent. However, obtaining the emergency imported supplies required getting a special waiver of EU export restrictions. From the Telegraph piece:

The National Energy System Operator (Neso), which manages the grid, issued a rare emergency power supply warning on Tuesday after soaring temperatures triggered a slump in solar energy, with panels struggling to work in the hot conditions. It was subsequently withdrawn after Neso secured emergency supplies from the Continent on Wednesday. Kathryn Porter, an industry consultant, said Neso had “begged the EU” to lift import trading limits which would have capped the amount of energy Britain could import. Ms Porter said the sudden easing of restrictions had allowed the UK to obtain 2.3 gigawatts (GW) of imports versus a 1.5 GW limit introduced in May, helping Britain avoid power shortages.

OK, crisis averted, for now. But Homewood reports on a few other aspects of this solution to Britain’s crunch. First, they had to buy the power from the Netherlands on a day-ahead market that was already at a high level due to the heat wave and lack of dispatchable capacity. Homewood links a Tweet from a firm called Montel Analytics as to the price: “[T]hey are paying up to €1600 per MWh for it.” €1600/MWh is equivalent to more than $2000/MWh, or more than $2.00/kWh. That will translate to a retail price of around $2.50/kWh, compared to average U.S. retail electricity prices of under $0.20/kWh.

Oh, and almost all of the imported power was generated from either natural gas or coal.

In other words, the only effect of the wind/solar generation obsession has been to drive up the cost of electricity to consumers and businesses to ridiculous levels. And, next time around, when the next wind/sun drought comes along on a hot evening, the imported power may not be available at all, and widespread blackouts could follow.

Thank you, Andrew, for getting the subject of coal-fired electricity generation back into the conversation. It’s only a question of time before this will happen.