> Saying "China is >50% coal while the US is only 15%" misses half the picture, because the combined gas + coal percentage is actually almost the same,
Except that coal emits almost twice as much CO2 as natural gas per unit of heat generated, and on top of that the majority of US natural gas plants are combined cycle (which converts more of the heat into electricity), because combined cycle is easy for gaseous fuels, whereas neither China nor anyone else is doing combined cycle for coal at scale because it requires turning the solid coal into a gas first.
> the US only really gets to enjoy that cleaner gas in its energy mix because it has so much of it (while China has none).
Oil and gas are an international commodity. It's not even like anyone has a monopoly on it -- if you don't like the US, buy it from Russia. If you don't like Russia, buy it from countries in the middle east.
On top of that, it's assuming that a modern grid even needs to be 60% fossil fuels. Meanwhile several other countries are demonstrating that it isn't at all necessary.
> Blaming China for using coal instead of gas just feels like blaming non-Norway countries for not using enough hydro power to me.
It's not physically possible to build large-scale hydro power in a place like Iraq or Singapore. China can't import a river from Norway. They could very easily import natural gas from any number of countries -- as many other countries do.
> What makes gas power acceptable and coal not? And the obvious answer is just that fossil fuels are a really attractive as dispatchable power.
Except that isn't the real answer. The real answer is that the US has a major oil industry lobbying to sustain its existence. Which is a bad reason, but nobody has figured out a great way to overcome it yet. However, that doesn't apply when you're only first building the infrastructure in the first place, because then you don't have incumbents trying to sustain a status quo that isn't yet established -- and then why would you pick the most terrible one to entrench?