[kingkongreveng_]

I'm not sure I understand you. The point is no combination of any known substitutes are close to competitive with current fossil fuel usages.

Coal is basically in the same situation as oil, contrary to what you may have heard. The good stuff is gone and it's getting more and more expensive already, when measured by joules of net energy per dollar. It's lower quality and harder to mine stuff.

[Retric]

If coal supply was really becoming limited you would see most extraction locations receiving huge profit as they reduce supply just like oil due to lack of completion. (It's a simple question of discounted future cash flows and competition.) However, the price of coal is still dominated by the cost of extraction and shipment across the board.

Fossil fuels are really mindbogglingly cheap, but you still see completion such as: Ethanol fuel in Brazil, nuclear power France, and by looking at the subsidies it takes to adopt wind power you can see how close it is to coal.

[kingkongreveng_]

I don't follow your line about huge profits. The simple fact is coal, when measured in terms of energy content, is getting scarcer and more expensive.

You can't look at state supported industries and come to any meaningful conclusions. All those examples have government driving them. Nuclear fission power would not even exist without government: the plants and businesses are uninsurable in the free market. No private insurance company to date has concluded the lifetime risks of a nuclear power plant are acceptably quantifiable.

[noss]

Who would require them to be insured if there were no government?