The coal is still important for the economic wellbeing and personal welfare of the people in those countries, whether it's used for power generation or materials production.
Notice how easy and noble-seeming it is to say that, compared to saying "I believe we should force more people in developing countries to stay in poverty for longer", even though they amount to the same thing?
Please understand, I'm with you that climate change is important to mitigate; I lived through the bushfires and smoke haze this Australian summer, and I worry about the prospect of that being a more normal part of our future.
I'm also expecting a child and have concerns for their future, as well the broader effects of climate change and environmental damage on humanity and nature everywhere.
But I know that it will take more than scapegoating Australian politicians (funny how it's the conservative politicians that get attacked over this, even though their coal export policies aren't substantially different from Labor's) to fix the problem, when the whole reason for the demand for coal is that people in the developing world just want, quite reasonably, a standard of living approaching what we in the west take for granted.
If these discussions involved sensible ideas about how developing countries could modernise their economies without fossil fuels, or acknowledged that large-scale carbon capture will have to be part of a comprehensive climate change solution, then I might be able to start taking them seriously.
But I guess that kind of discussion doesn't deliver the quick hit of sanctimony that so many people seem to crave.
There's no evidence to suggest that we can't alleviate poverty without coal. We can alleviate poverty any number of ways. Your hyperbolic and emotional assertions about the need for Australia to continue selling coal don't inspire confidence.
The coal is still important for the economic wellbeing and personal welfare of the people in those countries, whether it's used for power generation or materials production.