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 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. 

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 14th Five-Year Energy plan published in 2020. That framing continues to shape the 15th Five-Year plan published earlier this month, in which authors reaffirm coal’s role as the country’s “foundational” energy source. 

This year’s planning report does emphasize “clean and efficient utilization” of coal, as well as “promoting the peaking” of its use, but stops short of specifying the year in which said glorious “peak” might happen or how many years the period of phasing it all down will take. Why play such word games? Because again, it’s all a grand game. 

Not that the Chinese haven’t invested massively in wind and solar – they certainly have, so much so that the country’s “renewable” sector contributed as much as 10% to China’s gross domestic product in 2024. Of course, the troublesome reality there is that those wind, solar and battery installations and exports were manufactured in factories powered by coal, fed by raw metals mined by diesel-powered heavy equipment, realities the World Economic Forum (WEF), the United Nations (UN) and their media cheerleaders prefer to ignore.

They’ve built so much of the stuff in fact that this year has seen record levels of curtailment of these weather-reliant energy sources. An estimated 360 terawatt hours of wind and solar went wasted during the first half of 2026 alone, a near-50% year-over-year increase.

The latest Five-Year Plan goes on to call for strengthening coal’s regulatory function within a “new-type power system,” concentrating production in northern security bases, modernizing mines to reduce emissions and pollution and diversifying some coal enterprises into chemicals and other industrial businesses. It also emphasizes methane controls and efficiency upgrades for existing plants but predictably makes no mention of hard consumption caps or rapid retirement schedules.

So, should we really expect China, a nation with transparent designs on global domination, to just voluntarily surrender its Divine Needle to gain praise from climate alarm prophets of the global order? Don’t be silly. 

That brings us to another troublesome reality which Dr. Fournier describes: The fact that, at current consumption levels, China’s domestic coal supplies will be essentially depleted over the next 30 years or so. In his report, Fournier says the evidence at hand “does not describe a nation merely hedging against uncertainty. It describes a state systematically preparing for regional war and coercive resource acquisition.”

After all, energy security is in fact inseparable from national security. Why would any rational person expect China to voluntarily give up on protecting that?

David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.