Coal is Still King – and Vital to Save the West

Ask at least 90 percent percent of younger Americans under the age of 35 and probably 100 percent of Western European of the same generation, and their answer will be unanimous: The happy and prosperous future of civilization and even the survival of the human race depends on cutting ‘greenhouse gas’ emissions to zero by the year 2050 and converting to an economy based on nice, ‘clean’ ‘renewable’ and eternal energy sources led by wind and solar power – with, of course, a huge dollop of nuclear energy thrown in.

There is just one problem with this glittering vision: Like so many visions and tantalizing promises of Paradise and Heaven on Earth that have beguiled the human race throughout history, it is a fantasy unsupported by any empirical evidence – we used to call them “facts” – at all.

It just isn’t true.

In his keynote address to the XVII Eurasian Economic Forum in Ras-Al-Khaimah in the United Arab Emirates on December 5, 2024, Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin spelled out the clear, truthful, simple, straightforward and unavoidable realities of global energy production and usage.

Over the past 200 years, the human race has soared in numbers from one billion to more than eight billion. Standards of living and human longevity have also improved exponentially on a scale never before dreamed.

And this unprecedented achievement has been based on industrialization, powered by three fundamental power sources: oil, gas, and coal.

“Thanks to fossil fuels, the global energy system has become the foundation of modern life. Over the past 200 years, the use of hydrocarbons has made energy more accessible, and this, together with improvements in healthcare and human nutrition, has led to an increase in life expectancy from 30 to 70 years, while the share of the global population living in extreme poverty has fallen from 90 percent to 10 percent,” Sechin said.

Nor – despite the mad technobabble from miseducated decadent intellectual elites across the West, ignorant of all experience in engineering and any basic knowledge of physics, chemistry, and geology – is that going to change.

“Oil accounts for over 30 percent of global energy consumption, coal for 25 percent, and gas for 22 percent, and it looks like we are still far from peak demand for fossil fuels,” Sechin noted.

Within the past two years, enormous new Inconvenient Facts have confirmed Sechin’s assessment. Global dependence on fossil fuel is growing – and it is going to grow far more – in the decades ahead.

And an increasing not shrinking proportion of that usage is going to come from the oldest and most despised ‘fossil fuel’ of all – coal. Millions of students and university graduates around the world, of course, will be outraged at that statement.

Virtually all Americans under the age of 35 will dismiss me as an ignorant, ancient, ridiculous crackpot for believing it, let alone proclaiming it in public.

Of course, for making his assessment openly, Sechin is not only ridiculed, far worse, he is simply ignored. He is, after all, the head of Rosneft and therefore the CEO of one of the largest oil and petrochemical corporations on the planet.

He is a former deputy prime minister of Russia and longtime trusted colleague of President Vladimir Putin. And worst of all, he is Russian. Therefore, no policymaker or “educated” individual across the European Union or the United States will believe a word he says.

Especially because it is all true.

However, over the past three years, there has been an inconvenient smashing of reality through that Iron Curtain or Berlin Wall of Invincible Western Ignorance and Prejudice. The leaders and peoples of the two largest population nations on Earth, comprising 35 percent of the entire human race, simply do not believe it.

According to a Taylor English Insights assessment from 2022 to the beginning of 2024, China and India have dramatically accelerated and expanded their already enormous programs of coal mining and construction of coal-fired electrical power generating stations.

“One-third of all CO₂ emissions across the globe (30.7 percent in 2022) were generated by China,” the report acknowledged. “With 1,142 coal-fired power plants in operation as of July 2023, mainland China currently has a far greater number of coal-fired plants than any other country.”

India comes in a distant second with 282 coal-fired plants, and the USA is third with 210 plants. Indeed, the United States is moving now, following Germany, to shut down most of its remaining coal-fired power plants by the end of this decade, only five years from now.

“Approximately 170 of the remaining coal-fired plants in the US are scheduled to be decommissioned by 2030, and there are no plans to build any new coal-fired plants in the US,” Taylor English said.

However, by contrast, “China is adding to its inventory of coal-fired power plants at a record rate,” the assessment said.

The figures are indeed overwhelming. “During the first six months of 2023, China issued permits for the construction of approximately 50 new coal-fired power plants, an average of two per week.

China currently has more than 300 coal-fired plants that are either under construction, permitted, or awaiting permitting. If all 300 plants are constructed, China’s inventory of coal-fired power plants will increase by more than 25 percent,” Taylor English said.

Ironically, Western news sources led by The Guardian and Reuters News Agency in Britain are celebrating a relative slow-down in new construction starts of power plants across China in the second half of 2024.

However, all these reports simply ignore the enormous investment in starting so many coal-fired generating stations in the previous year. Thus, China’s Great Leap Forward in building so many new coal-fired generating power plants is being presented to gullible Western audiences as a commitment to ‘Green Renewables’ instead!

This is an inversion of the truth and barefaced lie that the Nazis themselves would have gaped at.

Thus, another Inconvenient Fact can be universally ignored. “Currently, China has six times more coal-fired power plants under construction than the rest of the World combined,” Taylor English noted.

This rapid growth prompted Global Energy Monitor research analyst Flora Champenois to conclude, “Everybody else is moving away from coal, and China seems to be stepping on the gas,” the Taylor English assessment noted.

In India, it is the same story. In 2024, according to the Institute for Energy Research (IER), “India will start operating new coal-fired power plants with a combined capacity of 13.9 gigawatts – the highest annual increase in at least six years.”

In addition to this enormous government-directed national program, private Indian firms have expressed interest in building at least 10 more gigawatts of coal-fired power capacity over the next decade, the IER said.

When implemented, this secondary private sector program will end “a six-year drought in significant private involvement in the sector. India’s government cited energy security concerns amid surging power demand and low per-capita emissions to defend its dependence on coal,” the IER report said.

We should also note that the kind of passionate popular environmentalist and Global Climate mass movements that take place in the West, determined to ban all use of coal and even oil as primary energy simply, do not exist in both China and India.

Does this make the Indian and Chinese peoples, their political leaders, scientific and media establishments energy illiterates and idiots?

Or does it rather mean, they have maintained their sanity and clear-eyed recognition of reality in a world where the Western elites, for far too long liberated from the immediate need to feed, heat, clothe, and protect their own peoples, have literally become suicidal and insane?

Sechin in his Eurasian Energy Forum address explained why coal – along with oil and natural gas – remains essential and irreplaceable to maintain any level of comfortable, civilized life for billions of human beings around the world.

The volume of energy that can be moved 1,000 miles for a single US dollar is an enormous 4.4 megawatt hours (MWh) for pipeline oil and as much as 1.2 megawatt hours for pipeline gas, but only 0.2 megawatt hours for hydrogen.

“Developing a study by the great Russian scientist Petr Leonidovich Kapitsa, experts at McKinsey and researchers from Western universities have confirmed that fossil fuels also have a high energy flow density,” Sechin pointed out.

Therefore, diesel outperforms hydrogen by a factor of almost 30, and gas surpasses wind and solar energy by factors of 270 and 70, he continued. These figures are hard science: They cannot be dismissed as propaganda lies from a big bad Russian oil executive.

It is all those who ignore them who are living their heads high in the stratosphere of Cloud-Cuckoo Land.

More than a quarter century ago, I entered the field of energy reporting and analysis, and the very first thing I learned was that reliable, high levels of electricity-generation, sufficient to power and sustain any mass industrial modern society, could only come from four sources: nuclear, oil, natural gas, and that old extinct Cretaceous sleeping monster, King Coal.

A quarter of the way through our shining bright, clean and gleaming new 21st century, that situation has not changed.

To repeat this basic truth, “Oil accounts for over 30 percent of global energy consumption, coal for 25 percent, and gas for 22 percent, and it looks like we are still far from peak demand for fossil fuels,” as Sechin summarized in his Eurasian Energy Forum address.

Indeed, as documented above, China and India, with their combined population of 2.8 billion people or 35 percent of the total population of the planet, have already committed to massively expanding their coal mining and power-generating capabilities, not phasing them out, as Germany, Britain, and the United States have done.

Why? I explained the reason for this and even predicted the renewed demand for coal in my 2012 Book, That Should Still Be Us: How Thomas Friedman’s Flat World Fantasies Are Keeping Us Flat on Our Backs.

“Coal will be our future if for no other reason than we have so much of it,” I wrote. “Clean or dirty there will be coal. Coal and natural gas development is also going to be essential to cushion the inevitable rise in oil prices over the next decade.”

In fact, according to the most recent estimates, there are enough coal resources in the world to last for another 133 years at current rates of consumption. That should be plenty of time to get mature power generating technologies of nuclear fission or other, more exotic forms of energy being seriously investigated and developed online.

Indeed, as I noted in my book, we are going to run out of the fuel of the future (uranium) far sooner than we are going to run out of the fuel of the past (coal).