The world is burning more coal than ever before Europe had to quickly shift away from Russian natural gas and oil as a result of Russia's illegal aggression of Ukraine, while China suffered its biggest drought in history, which hurt its hydroelectric power generation and forced it to consume even more coal. Even France, famously powered by nuclear generation, had the bad luck to have several nuclear power plants need to go into maintenance at the same time this summer. This combination of extra-ordinary circumstances lead to the bad news: the world is burning more coal than ever before, even as we have to constantly fight to limit the effect of climate disasters. This is a terrible state of affairs, but there is a light at the end of the tunnel: renewables are growing way faster than expected, and coal consumption is expected to collapse in the next couple of years. The International Energy Agency estimate that within a short few years, coal will only be used as a backup energy generation, and not as a mainline source of energy as it is today. Source: https://edition.cnn.com/2022/12/16/world/coal-use-record-high-climate-intl/index.html