(DCNF)—Since the approval of the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015 by every nation on earth except the United States, the ever-compliant global media has flooded newsprint, airwaves and digital space with narratives that China is moving away from coal. We have been assured by tens of thousands of scholarly, peer-reviewed “studies” that the communist government there is rapidly displacing its gigantic fleet of coal power plants — bigger than the rest of the word’s combined — with glorious solar panels and windmills and battery arrays so enormous they’d cover Taylor Sheridan’s 6666 Ranch in the Texas panhandle.
It all makes for a glorious narrative, one heavily encouraged by Xi Jinping’s government in its ceaseless drive for acceptance by the global community and accumulation of geopolitical and hegemonic leverage. The narrative has gained such a high level of acceptance that China is invariably treated at the annual COP and World Economic Forum events as a full participant in the impossible globalist drive for Net Zero by 2050 even though its own nebulous commitments do not even begin to kick in until 2060 and beyond. In the meantime, China continues to expand its coal power fleet and ramp up its mining operations every year, a fact which seems to always be “unexpected” by the media’s preferred “experts” on such things.
Just one problem: It’s all a myth. In a recent analysis, Canadian energy analyst Dr. Joseph Fournier details the realty, which is that the Xi government remains as wedded to coal as former British prince Harry remains wedded to former Netflix star Meghan Markle. Fournier points out the fact that Chinese policymakers framed coal as “the sea-calming divine needle (a reference to the mythical magic staff of Sun WuKong) or ballast stone of national energy security” in the country’s 14th Five-Year Energy plan published in 2020. That framing continues to shape the 15th Five-Year plan published earlier this month, in which authors reaffirm coal’s role as the country’s “foundational” energy source.
This year’s planning report does emphasize “clean and efficient utilization” of coal, as well as “promoting the peaking” of its use, but stops short of specifying the year in which said glorious “peak” might happen or how many years the period of phasing it all down will take. Why play such word games? Because again, it’s all a grand game.
Not that the Chinese haven’t invested massively in wind and solar – they certainly have, so much so that the country’s “renewable” sector contributed as much as 10% to China’s gross domestic product in 2024. Of course, the troublesome reality there is that those wind, solar and battery installations and exports were manufactured in factories powered by coal, fed by raw metals mined by diesel-powered heavy equipment, realities the World Economic Forum (WEF), the United Nations (UN) and their media cheerleaders prefer to ignore.
They’ve built so much of the stuff in fact that this year has seen record levels of curtailment of these weather-reliant energy sources. An estimated 360 terawatt hours of wind and solar went wasted during the first half of 2026 alone, a near-50% year-over-year increase.
The latest Five-Year Plan goes on to call for strengthening coal’s regulatory function within a “new-type power system,” concentrating production in northern security bases, modernizing mines to reduce emissions and pollution and diversifying some coal enterprises into chemicals and other industrial businesses. It also emphasizes methane controls and efficiency upgrades for existing plants but predictably makes no mention of hard consumption caps or rapid retirement schedules.
So, should we really expect China, a nation with transparent designs on global domination, to just voluntarily surrender its Divine Needle to gain praise from climate alarm prophets of the global order? Don’t be silly.
That brings us to another troublesome reality which Dr. Fournier describes: The fact that, at current consumption levels, China’s domestic coal supplies will be essentially depleted over the next 30 years or so. In his report, Fournier says the evidence at hand “does not describe a nation merely hedging against uncertainty. It describes a state systematically preparing for regional war and coercive resource acquisition.”
After all, energy security is in fact inseparable from national security. Why would any rational person expect China to voluntarily give up on protecting that?
David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
