Wicked, grubby old King Coal, they said, was on his last legs.

Weeks before the signing of the Paris Climate Accord at the end of 2015, Carbon Tracker (“aligning capital market actions with climate reality”)  estimated that if the world was to meet the climate target set out in the agreement, then, according to the International Energy Agency’s “450” scenario, “the production from … existing coal mines is sufficient to meet the volume of coal required … It is the end of the road for expansion of the coal sector.”