By Vijay Jayaraj

As a boy growing up beside India’s railway lines, I found magic in the metallic thunder of passing trains. Now and then, freight cars piled high with black coal would roll by. That same evening, our lights would flicker out.

There, I’d sit still in the hush of a powerless night, staring into the warm dark, wondering why electricity was so elusive. Hours earlier, the answer had clattered past: coal, in plain sight, yet out of reach.

At the time, India lacked its currently extensive coal mining and power generation facilities. Today, however, coal is the backbone of energy production, supplying over 70% of India’s electricity. The dark evenings of my childhood have been brightened.

Other developing countries have learned from China and India how coal jump-starts economies and lifts millions from poverty. Now, they too line up for their share of the fuel that sparked the Industrial Revolution.

Global coal production reached an all-time high of nearly 9 billion metric tons in 2024. Chinese and Indian output continued to grow, and Indonesia set export records.

India is on track to burn twice as much coal as the U.S. and Europe put together – possibly within the year – while China has already surged ahead, consuming 30% more coal than every other nation combined.

Growing by almost 12% in 2024, India’s production is projected to climb to over 1 billion metric tons in 2025 – a harvest that would exceed America’s peak in 2008.

This week, Adani Power invested $2 billion in a 1,500 megawatt, ultra-supercritical coal-fired power plant in India’s state of Uttar Pradesh to supply one of the most densely populated regions in the world.

Coal shipments to Southeast Asia are on a steady climb, with nations like Vietnam and the Philippines leading the demand. Annual imports across the region are projected to grow nearly 3%.

Rising production of South American crude steel will increase demand for metallurgical coal, which is converted to the coke required to make steel from iron. The continent produced 3.7 million metric tons of steel in March, up 6.5 percent from a year earlier, with Brazil contributing nearly 80% of the total.

With African energy production on the rise, South Africa remains the continent’s largest coal producer and consumer. State power utility Eskom uses coal to generate more than 70% of its electricity and recently added 800 megawatts of capacity to help stabilize the power grid.

Zambia and Zimbabwe are restarting coal-fired plants and advancing new coal projects to improve their energy security amidst power crises. Zambia’s largest coal mine, Maamba Collieries, is slated for an expansion.

Even the U.K. government, while still parading its “net zero” credentials, is, nonetheless, procuring coking coal to keep British Steel alive in Scunthorpe. The U.K. may import the fuel from Japan or Australia, presumably because mining coal from Britain’s indigenous deposits is more scandalous than the hypocrisy of its absurd climate policy.

In the U.S., President Trump has prioritized coal under a new executive order, fast-tracking projects like Warrior Met’s Blue Creek mine in Alabama, which will boost metallurgical coal output by 60% for export markets. Additionally, the U.S. approved the expansion of the Spring Creek Mine in Montana, enabling nearly 40 million tons of coal to be mined over the next 16 years.

The global coal-fired power fleet increased by less than 19 gigawatts in 2024, the lowest net rise in two decades. This is due to retirement of coal plants in Europe and the transition to more modern coal plants in Asia. Coal prices, too, have been sluggish in recent months.

Nevertheless, sustained growth and demand in the existing coal markets of Asia and the emerging markets of Africa and Southeast Asia will continue to propel production and consumption across the world. In 2024, coal accounted for 35% of total power generation globally, the highest among all sources of energy generation.

Coal is expected to dominate the energy sector for at least three more decades, barring a disruption by rapid innovation that would enable its economical displacement. Similarly, the mineral will continue to play a crucial role in iron and steel production absent development of a viable alternative.

Predictions to the contrary are just so much hot air – largely from those most averse to a warming atmosphere.

This commentary was first published at Daily Caller on June 16, 2025.

Vijay Jayaraj is a Science and Research Associate at the CO₂ Coalition, Fairfax, Virginia. He holds an M.S. in environmental sciences from the University of East Anglia and a postgraduate degree in energy management from Robert Gordon University, both in the U.K., and a bachelor’s in engineering from Anna University, India.

In light of the recent Nature study I discussed yesterday in Settled Science Springs a Leak, it’s time to revisit a position I’ve long held—and, it turns out, one that now requires correction. Specifically, the long-standing assumption that carbon isotope ratios (δ¹³C and Δ¹⁴C) provide unambiguous proof that the rise in atmospheric CO2 is almost entirely anthropogenic.

For years, I’ve maintained that anyone challenging the anthropogenic origin of the CO2 increase had to address the isotope fingerprint argument before their work could be taken seriously. Submissions that didn’t engage with the Δ¹⁴C or δ¹³C evidence were declined, often with little further discussion. That confidence, I now recognize, was misplaced.

The recent study, Old carbon routed from land to the atmosphere by global river systems, has fundamentally altered the context in which the isotopic attribution arguments operate. According to the authors, 59% of global riverine CO2 emissions are sourced from old carbon, meaning millennial-aged carbon from deep soils, sediments, or rock weathering—not recently photosynthesized biomass.

These emissions are radiocarbon-dead, lacking the Δ¹⁴C signal, and are often depleted in δ¹³C—precisely the isotopic traits long attributed to fossil fuel combustion. Until now, these natural contributions were omitted from carbon cycle models and largely absent from attribution logic.

“This previously unrecognized release…equates to 1.2 ± 0.3 Pg C year⁻¹… and 41 ± 16% of river CO2 emissions…could contain recent anthropogenic-derived carbon.”

The implication is unambiguous: the very isotopic signatures used to claim anthropogenic dominance in atmospheric CO2 are now also emerging from newly recognized natural processes at global scale. These rivers are essentially exhaling ghosts—carbon that predates the industrial era by centuries or even millennia—and doing so in quantities on par with major biospheric fluxes.

The Isotope Argument Just Got Muddy

The confidence behind isotopic attribution rested on the idea that only fossil fuels could be responsible for the observed depletion in δ¹³C and Δ¹⁴C. This paper shatters that by showing that the Earth has its own large, continuous natural source of isotopically similar carbon.

Previously, isotope-based attribution was treated like a fingerprint match: the crime scene carbon looked like fossil fuel carbon, and fossil fuel emissions matched the rising levels in the air. Case closed.

But now we know there’s another suspect. And he’s been walking around in the open the whole time—we just didn’t test the rivers.

A Second Look, Long Overdue

To be clear, this doesn’t prove the rise in atmospheric CO2 is not anthropogenic. But it does mean that the evidentiary strength of isotopic data as a sole or dominant indicator of that origin is now substantially weaker.

Climate science has always leaned heavily on isotope ratios because they offered a veneer of mathematical certainty. With the carbon mass balance deeply uncertain, and the models riddled with arbitrary assumptions, the isotopes offered something that looked solid.

Now that, too, is compromised.

To those contributors whose submissions I rejected on the basis that they did not sufficiently address the isotope argument: I owe you an apology.

You raised objections in good faith. Many of you suspected that natural processes were more complex and underappreciated than the models allowed. This paper has proven that instinct correct. You didn’t need to disprove the Δ¹⁴C narrative outright; you simply needed the science to catch up to the question.

It just did.

Confidence Requires Humility

This study is a stark reminder that confidence in science is no substitute for humility in the face of uncertainty. That applies as much to editorial policy as it does to modelers, activists, or policymakers. In this case, the error was not in demanding rigor—but in assuming it had already been achieved.

Carbon isotope ratios remain valuable tools, but they are no longer unimpeachable witnesses. They are part of a broader, far more uncertain picture of how carbon moves through the Earth system—a picture we now know was missing a major river-fed chapter.

A Final Word

The takeaway is simple: no one gets to claim the science is settled when it just got rewritten.

And so, to every researcher, independent thinker, or persistent submitter who brought forth alternative views and was met with the standard rebuttal—“Come back when you’ve dealt with the isotope ratios”—you were due more openness than you received.

For that, I offer a strong, clear, and unreserved apology.