We saw last week the huge thumbs down that markets are giving coal in the US, with the cancellation of a Department of Interior sale of coal reserves, after the best offer was for less than a penny a ton.
Dinosaur autocrats love coal, because it helps concentrate power in their inner circle of Oligarchs.
Clean, distributed energy disseminates power more broadly, and spreads economic gains to grassroots communities.
The fossil fuel era is collapsing right in front of us, as the discussion above clearly lays out.
Russia’s coal collapse marks the breaking point of the fossil era. With thermal-coal prices down nearly 80 percent from their 2022 peak and over half of Russia’s producers now losing money, Moscow’s lifeline industry is imploding — even as renewables, batteries, and storage become the fastest-growing assets in the world economy.
According to the Financial Times, the sector lost Rbs 225 billion (≈ US$2.8 billion) in the first seven months of 2025 — more than double 2024’s total losses — as exports vanished and subsidies fail. Twenty-three coal companies — about 13 percent of the national total — have already shut down, and another 53 are at risk of closing. Once Russia’s fourth-largest export, coal has become its worst-performing industry in more than 30 years.
President Putin himself has admitted that “coal producers are having a tough time.”
The reason is brutally simple: logistics costs have soared — rising from 50 to almost 90 percent of the coal’s final price — while discounts to Asia remain steep, sometimes forcing producers to export at a loss merely to secure foreign currency and protect mining-region jobs.
Even Russia’s energy heartland of Kuzbass ended 2024 with a Rbs 70.6 billion deficit, deepening to Rbs 36 billion in the first half of 2025. A government rescue plan signed in May offered only limited tax deferrals and discounted freight tariffs — not enough to stem the collapse.
Three years ago, fossil producers celebrated record profits as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sent oil above US$120 per barrel and coal prices to historic highs. Many declared a new age of hydrocarbons. It wasn’t.
Even before the war, global oil demand had plateaued, coal use was declining across advanced economies, and clean-energy investment was already outpacing fossil growth. When the war triggered supply shocks, the market did what markets do: panic, speculate, correct.
According to the World Bank, coal prices are forecast to fall roughly 27 percent in 2025 and again in 2026. The era of scarcity is ending. What comes next is the era of technology — and it rewards efficiency, not extraction.
That shift is now visible not only in prices but in bankruptcies.
“War is bad for most of the Russian businesses, if not all of them. But the coal sector is in really deep shit,” one of Russia’s top businessmen told the Financial Times.
Coal accounts for less than 1 per cent of GDP and Russia’s state revenues, making it far less significant than oil or gas. But the industry directly employs more than 140,000 people and remains critical in some regions, both as a source of jobs and for funding local budgets.
“The coal industry is going through its sharpest crisis since the 1990s,” Vladimir Korotin, chief executive of Russian Coal, a top-15 producer, told state news agency Interfax earlier this year. “Thousands of jobs across a dozen Russian regions are at stake [as well as] . . . tax revenues ” he added.
For Russians, this carries symbolic weight. In 1989, mass miners’ strikes swept across the USSR, marking a pivotal moment in its collapse. Miners banging their hard hats on Moscow’s cobblestones also became a symbol of the 1998 economic crisis, the worst in Russia’s modern history.
I live in British Columbia where our provincial government is going all-in on developing the LNG industry. Billions in taxpayer dollars are being poured into the industry. With the collapse of the fossil fuel era the taxpayer will never see a return. It is hard to understand how governments can be so blind.
It is the job of lobbyists to make sure that politicians don’t see reality, and I’ve come to realize how very stupid and gullible a lot of politicians are…to the point where the savvy ones stand out.
BC needs an LNG industry like Springfield needs a monorail.