I encourage everyone here to read the underlying report for a more nuanced view: [1]. Apparently, the central government turned over permitting to provincial g

I encourage everyone here to read the underlying report for a more nuanced view: [1]. Apparently, the central government turned over permitting to provincial governments in 2014, leading to a massive surge in permits for coal plants, peaking in 2015 (see Fig. 3). Provincial governments wanted to promote growth above all else, so they went for coal. The central government was apparently alarmed by this, and imposed restrictions in 2016, leading new permits issued per year to drop by 80%. However, the new plants that were approved from 2014-2016 are still in the pipeline, which is why there are still new plants being built. The central government has slowed their construction and has proposed withdrawing a large fraction of the permits (for example, 150 GW of permits were canceled in 2018-19, while 8.5 GW of new construction was approved - see Table 4). But just as in the West, there's a powerful coal lobby in China, which is pushing for already permitted projects to go ahead, for restrictions on new permits for coal plants to be lifted, and for the overall cap the government has set (1.1 TW) to be increased. Playing into all of this is the general economic slowdown in China, which of course puts pressure on the government to ease restrictions. Despite all this, the trend in China is for less coal capacity to actually come online each year (Fig. 4). The question is really whether it will fall fast enough (Fig. 5). 1. https://endcoal.org/global-coal-plant-tracker/reports/out-of-step/ https://endcoal.org/global-coal-plant-tracker/reports/out-of...