The global energy debate is entering a reckoning it can no longer postpone. Not because activists have relented or governments have found consensus, but because geopolitics, productivity energy and national security have forced reality back into the room.
For more than a decade, climate policy drifted away from the original intent of the Paris Agreement. What was designed as a framework grounded in flexibility, technological diversity and sovereign choice was gradually reshaped into something far narrower: a moral hierarchy of fuels and an industrial strategy by omission.
Coal, in particular, was treated not as a resource to be modernized, but as a problem to be exported. That “elsewhere” has been China and India.
Today, the world’s most competitive manufacturing economies are not apologizing for using coal. They are engineering more sustainable applications, investing in their modernization and embedding it at the heart of national economic strategies to drive productivity, resilience and resource self-sufficiency.
Combined with oil, gas, renewables and nuclear, these diversified energy systems are designed to maximize reliability while supporting growth.
In India, coal is central to achieving the government’s vision of Atmanirbhar Bharat, economic self-reliance built on domestic capability. With around 28,000 megawatts of modern coal capacity under construction and a further 92,000 megawatts in planning, coal remains integral to India’s economic and sustainable future.
India has committed US$1 billion (₹8,500 crores) to coal gasification, targeting 100 million tonnes by 2030 to produce methanol and ammonia for fertilizers and industry, reducing import dependence while strengthening agriculture and manufacturing.
China takes a similar view. Coal sits firmly within the country’s Five-Year Plans, reflecting its role as a strategic industrial asset. China operates more coal-fired power capacity than the rest of the world’s combined wind and solar fleet, a reality many Western policymakers overlook.
It is also home to the world’s largest coal-to-hydrogen facility in Shaanxi, producing 350,000 tonnes of hydrogen annually, while coal-to-chemicals projects consume around 380 million tonnes of coal each year, roughly 8% of total coal use, supplying fuels and industrial chemicals essential to modern supply chains.
At the same time, China operates six large-scale carbon capture, utilization and storage facilities across power generation, chemicals and cement, collectively. That includes the Huaneng Longdong Energy Base, the world’s largest coal-based CCS project with capacity to capture 1.5 million tonnes annually.
Together, China and India demonstrate that coal continues to underpin steel, cement, fertilizer and chemical production, while enabling future growth in advanced carbon materials such as blue hydrogen and critical minerals.
The industrial products that define modern life, from infrastructure and housing to data centers, electric vehicles (EVs) and defense systems, are increasingly made in China or made in India, powered by coal-enabled value chains.
Even unprecedented Western spending has failed to change this trajectory. As economist Bjorn Lomborg has noted, the European Union and United States spent more than US$700 billion on green investments in 2024, yet global emissions still rose.
Only around 13% of this century’s emissions will come from OECD nations. The remaining 87% will come from countries still lifting millions out of poverty. Policies that undermine growth while failing to cut emissions are not climate leadership; they are strategic self-harm.
This imbalance has long been recognized by those grounded in development economics. When I spoke with Professor Mohan Munasinghe, a Nobel Peace Prize co-recipient and former vice-chair of the IPCC and architect of the “Sustainomics” framework, he reminded me that the UN Sustainable Development Goals place Poverty Eradication as Goal 1 and Climate Action as Goal 13 for a reason.
Sustainability was never meant to be pursued in isolation. It requires environmental responsibility, economic viability and social fairness to be delivered together. Forget that balance, he warned, and you forget humanity.
Finance is now rediscovering the same truth. Net-zero alliances have dissolved or been suspended as investors confront the limits of exclusionary frameworks. Exclusion does not decarbonize systems. Investment that drives technology deployment does.
That is why FutureCoal developed the Sustainable Coal Stewardship framework, a practical, technology-driven pathway grounded in what leading economies are already doing. Under SCS, coal ash is repurposed into low-carbon cement, coal waste is transformed into advanced materials such as graphene and carbon fiber, critical minerals are extracted from coal by-products and emissions are reduced by up to 99% through proven abatement technologies, including carbon capture and storage.
The energy transition will not be judged a failure because ambition was wrong, but because balance was abandoned. As countries rediscover the importance of sovereignty, security and industrial capability, coal will remain central – even where policymakers are reluctant to admit it.
China and India have already answered the question of coal’s future. The real question is whether the rest of the world is prepared to be honest about where its prosperity comes from, and what it takes to sustain it.
Michelle Manook is chief executive at FutureCoal, a global alliance for sustainable coal and the world’s only coal multilateral and neutral representative organization