Some Western nations appear to be waking up to the reality that they are being duped – that Net Zero is a fabrication of their own egos that other nations hardly take seriously. Just don’t count on the world’s two leading English-speaking nations, or the plutocrats in Paris, Geneva, and Davos, to follow suit. They still talk as if they still control the unfolding of world affairs.

Just last year, for example, a German company demolished an aging wind farm to expand a coal mine. To the BBC’s chagrin, Australia, too, continues to rely on its coal industry for much-needed jobs and revenues.

Yet the modern-day utopians in the U.S. and the UK still cling to the myth that emerging superpower nations like China, India, and Russia will bow before the World Economic Forum and United Nations grifters.

The BBC calls Australia “a stark outlier … in a world racing to reduce pollution.” They squawk that China, “along with G7 rich nations,” has made the Net Zero by 2050 pledge – despite watching China and many other nations dramatically increase their reliance on coal energy.

The BBC ignores the fact that global coal consumption has nearly doubled since 1998. Consumption jumped from 94.9 exajoules (3.24 billion tonnes) in 1998 to 150.4 exajoules 5.15 billion tonnes) in 2010 to a record high 8 billion tonnes in 2022.

China has doubled consumption from 1.5 billion tonnes in 2002 to more than 3 billion tonnes in 2022 (officially, but surely higher now). Coal consumption in India has skyrocketed, rising from 240 million tonnes in 2007 to 906 million tonnes in 2021.

China in the first half of 2023 started construction on 37 gigawtts of new coal power capacity, issued permits for another 52 GW, and announced the revival of 49 GW. China now has added 243 GW of new coal power, increasing capacity by up to 33% since January 2022.

India in 2022 reopened more than 100 coal mines to meet the growing demand for coal energy. Again this year India stepped up coal production to stop outages caused by lower hydropower output due to an ongoing drought. India has failed to meet its Paris Agreement goals for renewable energy, as coal in August provided three-quarters of the nation’s electricity.

Meanwhile, the U.S. consumed just 495 million tonnes of coal in 2021, down from a record 1,127 million tonnes in 2007. The major decrease began with President Obama’s pledge to bankrupt the U.S. coal industry. As House Natural Resources Committee chair Rep. Doc Hastings (R, WA) said in 2012, Obama “tried at every turn to make that goal a reality.”

As Hastings put it, the Obama Administration rescinded the 2008 Stream Buffer Zone Rule, entered into a consent agreement with environmental groups spent millions of taxpayer dollars to rewrite the rule, attempted to manipulate data to conceal its economic impact, and hid the final rule from the public until after the 2012 election.

China and India were exempted from having to cut carbon dioxide emissions both under the failed 1997 Kyoto Protocol and the 2016 Paris Agreement.  Grist claimed it was only fair for “the fattest man at the table” to be lenient with “hungry” nations “upon realizing that the food is running out.”

While the U.S. Senate rejected the Kyoto Protocol, the Senate never got to vote on the Paris Agreement. President Biden has doubled down on Obama’s pledge to make coal as much a pariah in the U.S. as it is in the UK.

Just a year ago, President Biden claimed coal plants in the U.S. were “too expensive to operate” – though he did not add, “because of President Obama’s egregious regulations.” He promised that “we’re going to be shutting these plants down all across America” and rely on increasingly expensive, intermittent wind and solar electricity.

U.S. coal production is also being hindered as Western U.S. ports seek to ban coal exports. Just since 2010, nine proposals that would have added 133 million tonnes of annual coal-handling capacity in the Pacific Northwest have been canceled. This has dealt major blows to coal mining operations and the economies in states like Utah, Montana, and Wyoming.

Just last year, the city of Oakland blocked a plan to ship low-sulfur Utah coal to Japan via a bulk terminal on the San Francisco Bay. The Utah Legislature had set aside $53 million to invest in terminal development. Utah coal is still shipped from three other California ports despite growing local opposition to any handling of coal.

To fill the void, Russia is ramping up coal production, with a goal of 668 million tonnes per year by 2035 – up from 441 million tonnes in 2019. Coal production had already risen 30% from 2011 to 2021.

A significant project upgrading operations at the 2.2 billion tonne deposit of coal in the Siberian town of Elga, which is covered by snow up to 9 months a year. According to Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak, “Growth prospects are primarily related to the growing market of the Asia-Pacific region.”

Indonesia, on pace to be the world’s fourth-largest economy by 2045, is building 19 gigawatts of new coal plant capacity, two-thirds of which will power nickel, cobalt, and aluminum smelters. The Jakarta government plans to turn Indonesia into a manufacturing hub for electric vehicles and batteries.

Coal today accounts for 43% of Indonesia’s grid electricity, but Indonesia is also one of the world’s leading coal exporters. The new plants will bump national capacity by a third to nearly 60 GW over a short time frame.

U.S. policy, by contrast, is aimed at shuttering coal plants, banning natural gas even for home appliances, and heavily subsidizing wind and solar projects to meet Net Zero decarbonization goals that Congress has never approved. As a result, the nationwide average electricity price rose 11% from 2021 to 2022. Electricity bills in 2023 are rising as much as 40%.

Similarly, household electricity prices in the UK doubled in the past decade despite the government setting a tariff cap to protect consumers. Last summer, electricity prices peaked at £363.7 per megawatt-hour.

A century ago, the British lion was the world’s leading economy. The Suez Crisis of 1956, it is said, confirmed Britain’s decline as a global power, and the transfer of Hong Kong to China in 1997 literally buried the British Empire.

The U.S. secured its position as the world leader after World War II but began a long decline just 15 years later with the Vietnam War. Today, the inheritors of U.S. policy – many from the Vietnam era – are making the withdrawal from Afghanistan (despite the pretenses of power in the Russia-Ukraine war) the sign of the end of the American empire.

How long will it be before the (likely) fall of Taiwan buries the remnants of American power?

How quickly can an empire collapse from its own rot?

Why have the U.S. and the UK backed away from fossil fuels even as other nations doubled down to upgrade their own economies with coal? One might believe that Western leaders just want to transfer their guilt for mismanaging their power by punishing the citizens who let them do it.

This article originally appeared at Real Clear Energy