In the reality I live in, there are alternatives to coal that are just as capable at heating your house but produce much less CO2.
But what's more surprising is that even in per-capita terms, global coal usage has increased since 1990.
However if you change your baseline year from 1990 to 2012, then global coal usage in absolute terms has declined, and will continue to decline over the long term even if there is a bump from the 2020 depressed levels (2020 is a terrible year to benchmark against).
Not true, coal usage[1]: 1990 -> 237Mt, 2016 -> 149Mt
As a tangent, I was shocked that Poland CO2 emission per capita is lower than one of Norway [2]: Norway 9.4t (2018), Poland 8.8t (2018)
[1] https://www.worldometers.info/coal/poland-coal/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...
Renewable energies are cheap (they are basically "free"). Deploying them is expensive. But you only have to subsidize the cost of deployment and after that it's cheaper for everyone.
It's the same thing with insulation : it's expensive, but once it's done correctly, you can basically heat your entire house with only the sun (if it's there) or really low energy consumption.
We're just missing the political will. The transition is possible and would create jobs for the decades to come.
That just sounds like a half-truth, otherwise people wouldn't always be so impassioned about subsidising renewable. They'd jest buy land and build honking great renewable plants.
Now the situation may have changed in the last decade or so, because the growth in renewables is very real. But it takes no political will to deploy cheap energy. There would be queues of bankers trying to invest if they thought they could undercut market producers and make good returns. Every greedy person on the planet (so somewhere in the region of 8 billion of them) would be happy to get in on the deal.
E.g. in Germany one of the chancellor candidates was state MP and personally & illegally forced expansion of coal strip mining while enacting new rules making wind power essentially impossible in his state.
At least in my country, AFAIK regulation explicitly allows for something like that: there's a net metering modality in which a group of consumers (for instance, a condominium) can split the credits from the net metering of a shared solar power plant. It's meant for precisely that scenario (power panels on the roof of an apartment building, each apartment has its own independent meter).