Coal Addiction ... a never ending part of our future...

The Triumph of King Coal: Hardening Our Coal Addiction by Fred Pearce: Yale Environment 360

The world is in the middle of a coal rush. 
Between 2009 and 2010, global coal consumption grew by almost 8 percent !!
Thanks to coal, the world’s economy is becoming more carbon intensive.

Richards Bay Coal Terminal (RBCT) is the single largest export coal terminal in the world.
Opened in 1976 with an original capacity of 12 million tons per year
it has grown into an advanced 24-hour operation with a design capacity of 91 million tons per year.
  

Difficult to read this Pearce article and come away with the idea we have any long term hope for change... and what does that mean for all of us.
We're developing and burning our way (oil & coal) to oblivion... it is just a matter of how soon it builds at this ever increasing pace of change.

The world is using more coal and less natural gas when it should be doing just the opposite. New figures for 2010 mean levels of greenhouse gases are higher than the worst case scenario outlined by climate experts just four years ago. The world pumped about 564 million more tons of carbon into the air in 2010 than it did in 2009. That's an increase of 6 percent.
It is a "monster" increase that is unheard of... extra pollution in China and the U.S. account for more than half the increase in emissions last year.
We are building up a horrible legacy for the generations to come..

"We have crossed, or are very near to crossing, nine "planetary boundaries" (defined in terms of sustaining the environmental conditions of the Holocene epoch in which civilization developed over the last 12,000 years): climate change, species extinction, the disruption of the nitrogen-phosphorus cycles, ocean acidification, ozone depletion, freshwater usage, land cover change, (less certainly) aerosol loading, and chemical use.  Each of these rifts in planetary boundaries constitutes an actual or potential global ecological catastrophe."

Capitalism is built on inherent principles of exponential growth... it cannot stand still.  The minimum adequate growth rate is usually thought to be around 3 percent, this means the economy doubles in size approximately every 24 years.  How many doublings of world output can the planet absorb before life on our only home begins to increasingly and dramatically degrade.

It's not a catastrophe all of a sudden is going to happen tomorrow... like what took place about 75,000 years ago, when the human population got reduced down to several thousand individuals in an incredibly short time frame by one natural disaster.
This will be of our doing over many years time (although not as little as one might want to think) ... and it'll just keep building up... normal will be less and less a part of the equation and our daily lives.

More and more people will come to understand what is happening and what will be happening in the near future. As this occurs, it's not going to be at all pleasant to live through... you'll not wish it on your worst enemy. 
The best and the worst of very large numbers of people will be readily evidenced. Just how bad it gets and how soon is anyone's guess.. but it is occurring at a pace of change that is far exceeding what even the most diehard skeptics thought possible just a relatively short time ago.

As it get to the point when most are asking what can be done... it will be way past the time of doing anything to turn it around... for all we know, we might be there now, as a growing number of knowledgeable folks are inclined to believe.

Should you choose NOT to want to believe the obvious... well, just watch the numbers..  follow progress towards that TRILLIONTH-TON  (make note those clocks keep ticking towards us). They won't lie or distort the truth as most of our leadership. If and when they start dropping, or even stabilizing, there will then be real cause for celebration.

Till then..  life goes on... and hope for change, pushed off to a farther distant dream.