President Trump was right - the Paris Climate Accord is nothing. It is just a bunch of brain-dead virtue signaling and a financial shakedown of large nations by non-governmental organizations. Nobody is going to give up their cheap energy - it seems that Coal is having quite the renaissance. From the New York Times:
As Beijing Joins Climate Fight, Chinese Companies Build Coal Plants
When China halted plans for more than 100 new coal-fired power plants this year, even as President Trump vowed to “bring back coal” in America, the contrast seemed to confirm Beijing’s new role as a leader in the fight against climate change.
But new data on the world’s biggest developers of coal-fired power plants paints a very different picture: China’s energy companies will make up nearly half of the new coal generation expected to go online in the next decade.
These Chinese corporations are building or planning to build more than 700 new coal plants at home and around the world, some in countries that today burn little or no coal, according to tallies compiled by Urgewald, an environmental group based in Berlin. Many of the plants are in China, but by capacity, roughly a fifth of these new coal power stations are in other countries.
Over all, 1,600 coal plants are planned or under construction in 62 countries, according to Urgewald’s tally, which uses data from the Global Coal Plant Tracker portal. The new plants would expand the world’s coal-fired power capacity by 43 percent.
A bunch more at the site - renewables are all well and good but they do not provide baseload power to the grid - they are too variable. Coal will be fine until we get thorium nuclear power. Fusion is a nice idea but commercial production has been just 30 years 'round the corner for the last 60 years.
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