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.
