[adventured]

> Looks like they'll still be on coal when most of the world will be moving off it.

That's only true if most of the coal-using world excludes the 2.7 billion people living in China and India, neither of which have any plans to phase out coal at all. The US is also only gradually phasing out coal, it'll still be a major coal energy producer 20 years from now (probably 15% of its power base at that point).

China is very aggressively expanding its coal use - despite using as much coal as the rest of the world combined already. It's presently adding more new coal generation than exists in the entire EU.

[imtringued]

That is true but I often see this used as a justification to not cut CO2 emissions because the "largest" emitters are growing their emissions. However, it doesn't make sense in terms of fairness because if you only look at current emissions you will not see the whole picture. When talking about fairness you always want to consider the cumulative CO2 [0] emissions that a country has emitted over it's existence and in those charts China is still a relatively small player despite having 1.3 billion people. Roughly 14% of the emissions in China are caused during the manufacturing of exported goods. The country is investing in electric mobility and renewable energy as much as it can. The only thing you can do to prevent an increase in CO2 emissions in China is to invent new technology that reduces CO2 emissions in a cost effective way. That won't happen if you just stick your head in the sand and continue defending obsolete technology.

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2019/10/Cumulative-CO2-tr...

[Reggi55]

> China is very aggressively expanding its coal use - despite using as much coal as the rest of the world combined already. It's presently adding more new coal generation than exists in the entire EU.

That's today, given the pace China works at they could easily commit to phasing out coal by 2037 and mean it too. They've already started planning for moving on from it. It's also entirely likely they could have less coal use (excluding steel and industrial uses) than from power stations than Germany in 2037 (1 year before Germany commits to phase it out)