Glencore’s message to the planet

IN “THE COAL QUESTION”UNCOP, written in 1865, William Stanley Jevons, a British economist, ascribed “miraculous powers” to the fuel source powering the Industrial Revolution. Coal, he wrote, stood entirely above all other commodities. Such were its superpowers, he fretted about the consequences for Britain if it ran out of the stuff. He needn’t have worried. Not only has coal proved impossible to exhaust. More than a century and a half later, the largest source of carbon emissions is devilishly hard to kill off.In 2021 the world, which was meant to “consign coal power to history” during the ’s 26 climate summit, probably consumed more coal-fired electricity than ever before, the International Energy Agency, the world’s pre-eminent energy forecaster, said in December. The strength of demand drove coal prices to record levels in October 2021. The buoyancy is expected to continue into 2022, not least because coal is a substitute for natural gas, whose price around the globe has continued to surge in the run-up to the new year.