You are correct, there's just a lot of plants and backwards thinking and political inertia, but fundamentally all that coal is being used at an economic loss.

You are correct, there's just a lot of plants and backwards thinking and political inertia, but fundamentally all that coal is being used at an economic loss. It is cheaper to replace an existing coal plant with new construction alternative energy even including the new procurement costs. That's without subsidies by the way. Oil will begin to be subject to this. When BEVs eat into oil demand sufficiently, financing and banking will evaporate for new projects, and the industry will undergo a reverse economies of scale in extraction, refining and shipping. Oil is already more vulnerable than coal to this, since the cost of extraction for oil is high compared to the old days of "stick pipe a couple feet in the ground and light sweet crude gushes out". The oil is coming out of deep water, fracking, tar sands, etc which all has a price floor which, if oil goes under that long enough (since banks won't float loans on this sector much longer), the entire extraction operation shutters, often permanently. Although we should absolutely be accelerating the rate of fossil fuel -> alternatives conversion with government subsidies.