It is frustrating as someone who lives in Canada and has spend so much money to remove coal that India and China have said FU to the world and increased their coal usage. I guess given that those two countries are keeping Russia afloat by buying their oil it shouldn't be a surprise, but its still disappointing to see those countries choosing the path they did.
Note that China's coal usage was basically flat in 2023 and expected to decline in 2024. China's coal capacity is increasing dramatically, but they're increasingly using their coal plants as peaker plants rather than for base production.
Every geopolitically relevant country will feel more secure with renewable, and therefore utterly independent, energy generation.
A reminder that Texas, a uniparty state literally run by Oil Barron families for decades, still gets at least a third of it's power from renewable sources, because it's so goddamned cheap. It doesn't matter how profitable oil is, or how much you pump, it will always be cheaper, and therefore more profitable, to replace it with power that just manifests itself out of the sky or wind for merely the cost of maintenance.
Each oil well requires tens of highly skilled, rather well paid tradespeople to manage, drill, run, explode, etc. An entire field of wind turbines requires one or two small teams of somewhat well paid maintenance engineers.