If you listen closely to the wind—assuming the wind isn’t currently choked with particulate matter and the screams of dying ecosystems—you can hear the sound of the world’s collective cognitive dissonance snapping like a dry twig. The latest report from the Department of the Obvious confirms what anyone with a basic understanding of human greed and thermodynamic reality already knew: Southeast Asia is burning coal like it’s going out of style, which, ironically, ensures that humanity will go out of style long before the coal does.

We are told, incessantly and with unearned moral superiority by international bodies and glossy brochures, that the world is in a “transition.” We are moving, they say, toward a bright, renewable future where unicorns fart clean hydrogen and photovoltaic cells pave the streets of Bangkok and Jakarta. But reality, that pesky, intrusive roommate that refuses to pay rent, has a different story. According to the latest data, Southeast Asia’s demand for coal is growing faster than anywhere else on the planet. The headline says this “overshadows” the region’s transition to renewable energy. That is a polite, journalistic way of saying that the “transition” is currently being strangled in a back alley by the undeniable economics of burning crushed carbon rocks.

Let’s dissect this hilarity, shall we? The narrative requires us to believe that we can simultaneously grow economies at breakneck speeds to satisfy the insatiable consumer maw of the global market while also switching to energy sources that are intermittent and expensive to scale. It is a mathematical impossibility wrapped in a political lie. Southeast Asia is the engine room of the modern world, the place where the West offshored its pollution so it could feel smug about its own emissions data. Now, as these nations attempt to industrialize and pull their populations into the consumer class—a hellscape of its own, mind you—they are doing exactly what Europe and America did two centuries ago: they are setting fire to the ground to keep the lights on.

To call this a “transition” is an insult to the English language. A transition implies moving from state A to state B. What is happening in Vietnam, Indonesia, and the Philippines is not a switch; it is an addition. They are adding renewables, sure, mostly to secure foreign investment loans and look good at cocktail parties in Davos. But beneath the thin veneer of solar farms and wind turbines, the baseload power is being provided by the black soot of the past. The demand for energy is rising so fast that renewables can’t even cover the *growth* in demand, let alone replace the existing fossil fuel infrastructure. We aren't cleaning up the mess; we are just buying a slightly nicer air freshener while the house burns down.

The delicious irony here is the global reaction. The West, having gorged itself on coal for 200 years to build the very wealth that now allows them to lecture others, stares in horror at Southeast Asia. “Stop burning coal!” they cry, from their air-conditioned offices powered by natural gas, typing on computers manufactured in the very coal-powered factories they are condemning. It is a spectacle of hypocrisy so dense light cannot escape it. The developing world looks at the West and sees a drug dealer telling them to stay sober. They look at the energy requirements for their projected GDP growth, look at the cost of coal, and make the only decision capitalism allows: they choose the cheap, dirty energy. Because in the grand tournament of nations, nobody wins a prize for having the cleanest air if their economy is in the toilet.

This “overshadowing” of renewable progress is not a temporary blip. It is the fundamental architecture of our civilization. We are a species addicted to energy density. We crave it. We need it to power the server farms that host our cat videos, the AI models that write our college essays, and the electric vehicles that we pretend are saving the planet despite being built with minerals strip-mined by diesel-guzzling excavators. Southeast Asia is merely the current epicenter of this addiction. They are the ones currently tasked with feeding the beast, and coal is the most convenient fodder.

So, spare me the shock and the hand-wringing. The “green transition” in the fastest-growing regions of the world is largely a myth, a bedtime story told to keep investors from jumping out of windows. The reality is soot, smoke, and a relentless, climbing line on a graph measuring megawatt-hours. We are not transitioning away from carbon; we are marinating in it. The only thing renewable about this situation is our capacity for self-delusion. We will burn every last rock we can dig up, and we will do it while issuing press releases about how green we are becoming. The atmosphere, indifferent to our spin, will simply continue to heat up, likely laughing at us the entire time.