“The green transition failed not because it went too far — but because it refused to tell the truth.”
- adaptationguide.com
Coal, Lies, and the Green Theater
Europe Wakes Up to China’s Energy Reality
This is not a pro‑coal essay. It is not an anti‑renewables essay. It is an anti‑lie essay.
For years, Canada and Europe wrapped themselves in the language of climate virtue while quietly assuming someone else would do the dirty work of powering the global economy. That illusion is now collapsing.
Canada is back in the carbon business. New oil pipelines are almost certainly coming. The Alberta tar sands will expand to feed them.
Across the Atlantic, the European Union is building new natural‑gas plants, postponing net‑zero projects, and — in some countries — keeping coal alive on life support.
This is bad news for the planet. But it is not irrational.
What has finally shattered the green fantasy is not climate denial. It is arithmetic.
The Unspoken Truth No Leader Will Admit
No Canadian or European leader will say this out loud, but the calculation is obvious:
Any carbon savings achieved in Europe or Canada are being overwhelmed — many times over — by rising emissions elsewhere.
Chief among them: China.
Donald Trump understood this dynamic early, albeit crudely and self‑servingly. Europe refused to confront it at all — until electricity bills exploded, factories shut down, and voters revolted.
The result? A slow, embarrassed retreat from absolutist climate policy.
Europe’s Industrial Self‑Sabotage
Europe’s corporate leaders are furious — and they are not wrong.
Electricity prices in Germany, Britain, and Italy are among the highest in the developed world — roughly double those in the United States and dramatically higher than in China. The outcome is predictable:
Steel plants close
Chemical companies leave
Manufacturing migrates
Workers lose jobs
This is not a “green transition.” It is deindustrialization by policy design.
While Europe lectures itself into economic paralysis, China expands — powered by the very fuels Europe pretends it has morally transcended.
China’s Brilliant, Brutal Energy Strategy
China plays the cleanest dirty PR game on Earth.
On one side of the ledger:
Exploding renewable capacity
Electric vehicles dominating headlines
Solar panels flooding global markets
Wind turbines as far as the eye can see
On the other:
Coal plants running the system
Coal plants powering factories
Coal plants charging EVs
Coal plants manufacturing solar panels and batteries
China is a green‑energy champion and the world’s largest coal consumer — simultaneously.
That contradiction is not hypocrisy. It is strategy.
More than half of China’s electricity still comes from coal. Construction of new coal plants never meaningfully stopped. In one recent year alone, China accounted for the overwhelming majority of new coal‑plant construction worldwide — adding capacity on a scale Europe hasn’t matched in decades.
Why?
Because coal works.
The Ugly Advantages of Coal (That Europe Refused to Admit)
Coal has properties policymakers hate to discuss:
Speed: Coal plants can be built quickly.
Cost: Fuel supplies are vast and prices are volatile but manageable.
Flexibility: Output can be ramped up or down far faster than nuclear.
Security: Coal is domestic, storable, and geopolitically boring.
China learned the lesson Europe refused to learn:
Energy security beats energy purity every time.
Europe’s Belated Awakening
After decades of winding down coal, Europe now faces a hard limit.
Renewables alone cannot:
Keep heavy industry alive
Stabilize power grids
Prevent price shocks
Win elections
So the EU improvises.
Germany is building gas‑fired plants — with the comforting fiction that they will someday run on hydrogen. Italy and Greece are doing the same. Elsewhere, net‑zero projects are quietly delayed or canceled.
This is not climate leadership.
It is damage control.
The Pandemic Test: Where Europe Was Actually More Humane
Here is where the moral conversation becomes uncomfortable.
When it came to public health — actual life and death — the so‑called “European way” proved far more humane than China’s model of control.
We still do not know how many people truly died during the pandemic in China. Data opacity, censorship, and political fear ensured that.
Europe made catastrophic mistakes — including its addiction to Russian oil and gas — but it did not weld people into apartments or erase entire cities from the data record.
Europe failed to tell its public the truth about energy dependence. Failed to slow it down for health and security reasons. Failed to prepare.
But Europe did not lie about bodies.
That matters.
The Lie at the Heart of the Green Debate
The central lie was never that renewables are bad.
The lie was this:
That Europe could decarbonize faster than the rest of the world — and somehow not pay the price.
China knew better.
China built renewables on top of coal, not instead of it.
Europe tried to replace hydrocarbons outright — without storage, without redundancy, without public consent, and without industrial protection.
The result is not climate justice.
It is strategic self‑harm.
What This Moment Demands
Not denial. Not surrender. Not green theater.
It demands:
Brutal honesty about trade‑offs
Energy policy rooted in physics, not slogans
Public consent based on truth, not guilt
Climate action that does not sacrifice workers as collateral damage
The planet is overheating.
But pretending China doesn’t exist won’t cool it.
And destroying Europe’s industrial base won’t save it.
Final Word
Coal is killing the climate.
But lies are killing democracy.
And Europe is finally learning the difference — far later than it should have, and at enormous cost.
The green transition will either be grounded in reality — or it will fail.
There is no third option.
yours truly,
Adaptation-Guide
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