Liam Denning, Columnist

Coal's 20-Year Reign Masks a Brewing Revolution

Wind and solar are growing faster than incumbent power sources.

June 13, 2018 at 4:21 PM UTC

Liam Denning is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering energy. A former banker, he edited the Wall Street Journal’s Heard on the Street column and wrote the Financial Times’s Lex column.

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BP’s latest Statistical Review of World Energy, released Wednesday, contains a chart that could leave environmentalists feeling somewhat flat (much like the lines):

Coal’s share of the world’s electricity mix was about 38 percent in 1997, and in 2017 it was about ... 38 percent.1 Fossil fuels overall have actually increased their share, from 63 percent to 65 percent. Not exactly what folks in Paris or (even further back) Kyoto had in mind.