Yeah, the only reason coal emissions are going up is because they’re growing too fast for even renewable energy buildouts to match increasing demand, so coal is their only option to keep up with power and steel production. The alternative is to slow development, and they’re understandably not willing to do that with the US breathing down their necks and India right next door growing just as fast.
We cannot allow perfect to be the enemy of good. Governments move slowly, especially the US, so moving the needle a little bit this year will let us move it a little more next year. Gradually, funding environmental progress becomes more and more normal, and greater and greater actions to deal with climate change become acceptable. All great accomplishments started with a proverbial “pissing in the ocean” if you look back far enough in their development.
Let’s also be clear that the only alternative to Biden that exists, for the 2024 US election, under the current US voting system, would be far worse than Biden in every environmental category. It’s important to push back on the bad, but it’s even more important to promote the good work done by his administration, no matter how small of a good we think it is in the moment. If all we do is gripe about the bad, we’re helping every wealthy oligarch that wants us to think of governments as impotent and useless while they burn the planet to the ground.