It Is Absurd To Think China Will Ever Abandon Coal

Since the approval of the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015 by every nation on earth except the United States, the ever-compliant global media has flooded newsprint, airwaves, and digital space with narratives falsely claiming that China is moving away from coal. We have been assured by tens of thousands of scholarly, peer-reviewed “studies” that the communist government there is rapidly displacing its gigantic fleet of coal power plants – bigger than the rest of the word’s combined – with glorious solar panels and windmills and battery arrays so enormous they’d cover Taylor Sheridan’s 6666 Ranch in the Texas panhandle.

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It all makes for a glorious narrative, one heavily encouraged by Xi Jinping’s government in its ceaseless drive for acceptance by the global community and accumulation of geopolitical and hegemonic leverage. The narrative has gained such a high level of acceptance that China is invariably treated at the annual COP and World Economic Forum events as a full participant in the impossible globalist drive for Net Zero by 2050 even though its own nebulous commitments do not even begin to kick in until 2060 and beyond. In the meantime, China continues to expand its coal power fleet and ramp up its mining operations every year, a fact which seems to always be “unexpected” by the media’s preferred “experts” on such things.

Just one problem: It’s all a myth. In a recent analysis, Canadian energy analyst Dr. Joseph Fournier details the realty, which is that the Xi government remains as wedded to coal as former British prince Harry remains wedded to former Netflix star Meghan Markle. Fournier points out the fact that Chinese policymakers framed coal as “the sea-calming divine needle (a reference to the mythical magic staff of Sun WuKong) or ballast stone of national energy security” in the country’s 14^th Five-Year Energy plan published in 2020. That framing continues to shape the 15^th Five-Year plan published earlier this month, in which authors reaffirm coal’s role as the country’s “foundational” energy source.