This provocatively titled piece in the The Hub (“Why the world needs even more Canadian coal”) made me realize I know very little about one of Canada’s most important exports: coal.
Coal is often villainized because it is incredibly dirty way of generating power. I vaguely recall an article from maybe 20 years ago claiming something along the lines of “if everyone in Canada replaced their incandescent bulbs with energy-efficient ones, the greenhouse gas savings would be cancelled out by a single coal plant that China is building every [some shockingly short amount of time]”. Although, China’s dependence on coal for power has been falling for the past two decades.
It turns out LLM-assisted search is fantastic for finding these half-remembered quotes. Here is the exact article and quote I was remembering, from a 2008 Macleans magazine article (I was pretty close):
Even if every household in the U.S. screwed in an energy-efficient light bulb today, the savings in greenhouse gas emissions would be wiped out by fewer than two medium-sized coal plants - the kind of plant that is being built in China at a rate of one a week.
But coal is also used to make most of the world’s steel (“metallurgical coal”), and this is the kind of coal that Canada (or specifically, British Columbia) overwhelmingly exports. The article goes on to claim that Canada’s production of metallurgical coal is among the cleanest (by greenhouse gas emissions) in the world.
I guess players of Dwarf Fortress would be very familiar with the fact that coal is not only used as a source of fuel but also as an integral part of the steel-making process.