[stinkbeetle]

The population explosion of the 20th century, and our modern way of life in general, has been powered almost entirely with fossil fuels. The lives of everybody living today and all our societies including 3rd world ones is built on coal and petroleum. Except the North Sentinel Island people.

It will not be possible to keep things going they are, no matter what actions or inactions we need or should take.

[ZeroGravitas]

We can make cheap modular energy capture devices in robotic factories now.

Things will not stay the same anymore than they could when people found oil.

[stinkbeetle]

People have been claiming for at least a quarter of a century that coal was dead, killed by much cheaper renewables. Today, we will consider ourselves very lucky if we have only just (i.e., in 2024-25) passed global peak coal. All those people and "experts", wrong. Repeatedly and totally wrong. Why? There must have been terribly bad data, bad models, bad economics, or bad assumptions they had been using. I have heard very little in the way of acknowledgement about that or any effort to find and fix the root causes of such failures. Are today's claims still coming from these same flawed approaches?

And it's not just coal of course. Coal was the proverbial canary in the proverbial coal mine because it was supposed to have been killed off long ago. But there's gas and petroleum and we are a decade from global peak carbon even by presumably the same kind of wildly optimistic / flawed projections.

And just passing peak carbon is not the goal. 1990 level carbon emissions were considered catastrophic and we're nearly double that now. Getting it down to well below those levels is just so uncertain and such a long way out that nobody really knows what that will take or how long it will be.

Making solar panels in Chinese coal powered factories doesn't just magically fix everything. Just like it didn't 25 years ago when they said it had killed coal.

[ZeroGravitas]

You appear to have invented a totally different history to the one we just lived through so you can be grumpy about it.

Why was coal going to be phased out ages ago?

I remember a global scramble by some of the best minds on the planet to drive the cost of solar below the cost of coal because that was the only way they saw coal being displaced.

Like Google's Renewable Energy Cheaper Than Coal, or RE<C. Launched in 2007, or the US government's DoE Sunshot initiative in 2011 to reduce the cost of solar by 75%

What do you remember from your parallel timeline?

[stinkbeetle]

It is in fact the mindless coal is dead parrots who have been living in their own worlds for the past 25 years. And they're the ones who appear to be grumpy when that's pointed out.

[amanaplanacanal]

China is installing new solar faster than anybody else, in case you weren't aware.

[stinkbeetle]

Coal too. Or has India taken that crown yet?

New solar doesn't reduce CO2 emissions if it isn't even covering increasing demand.

[ZeroGravitas]

Solar is in actual fact covering the whole of increased electricity demand globally, as of 2026, and still growing fast.

It covered 75% in 2025. And wind the rest, also still growing.

We could have got there faster, but there was, and is, a long running disinformation campaign to deny there was a problem, question the root causes of the problem and demonise the most promising solutions.

[stinkbeetle]

So that just happened now, this year? Solar is only barely covering just growth? Decades after it had "killed coal"?

So it took solar that long to take the easiest 8% of global electricity generation share. The long-dead coal is somehow still far a larger producer of electricity. 4x bigger than total solar capacity.

[cuteboy19]

both countries reached peak coal this year.

[stinkbeetle]

Peak coal that was dead killed by far cheaper renewables 30 years ago? That's amazing, let's see for ourselves...

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/04/india-coal-power-heatwave-ln...

"Coal-fired power generation in India in April increased to 164.9 average gigawatts, compared with 160.7 average gigawatts last year, according to data shared by S&P Global Energy. According to the data, coal-fired power generation rose sequentially by 5.6 average gigawatts, or 3.5%, in April."

Yikes.