China and India are right to keep coal

‘The end of coal is in sight’ declared Alok Sharma, president of this year’s climate summit, to delegates in Glasgow attending COP26. Sharma was heralding the fact that more than 40 countries had agreed at the conference to phase coal out in the coming decades. But (and it is a very big but) along with the US and Australia, two of the world’s largest producers and consumers of coal declined to sign: India and China.

COP26 came to an end this week. But in the media coverage of the conference, there has been zero effort made to understand why two of the biggest consumers of fossil fuels have pushed back at attempts to reduce coal use. It is much more comfortable to run stories about how poor countries around the world are suffering instead. Last Wednesday, for example, the BBC’s climate editor told the story of a Madagascan family facing life-threatening consequences from the world’s first climate change made famine.