1) Surprising to the mainstream view even as recently as 2007, coal use globally has actually decreased in recent years, and mostly not due to any environmental

1) Surprising to the mainstream view even as recently as 2007, coal use globally has actually decreased in recent years, and mostly not due to any environmental regulation, but simply cost. 2) ...but surely, this cannot continue, and further decrease in coal will require environmental regulation. Uh, someone is not learning from what just happened. Renewables are on a decades long, Moore's Law-like exponential decline in cost per kilowatt-hour. Fracking has caused natural gas to decline in cost dramatically, and since the drop in oil prices has shown an ability to continually improve its cost structure; not so long ago it was thought that you needed $100/barrel oil for fracking to continue. There is no good reason to expect these trends to stop, especially the one for wind and solar, which have been going on for decades. We have, globally, passed Peak Coal, a few years back.