Coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel, is the crack cocaine of the developing world.
It is the inexpensive and plentiful fuel powering the rising economies of Asia -- and because of that, it has become one of the most intractable problems in combating global warming.
Even as the political will and grass-roots support to rein in rising carbon dioxide levels is growing, a large segment of the world is using more coal than ever.
The addiction threatens to undercut the landmark work of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which shared the Nobel Peace Prize with former Vice President Al Gore for work on global warming.
In a series of reports this year, the panel outlined the causes and consequences of global warming, along with solutions to avoid its most serious effects. The final installment of the panel's report -- a synthesis of its key findings approved by delegates from 140 countries -- was released Saturday.
The panel's road map for action hinges on all the world's biggest carbon polluters significantly reducing their emissions over the next 20 years.
But the reality is that for many countries, coal has been too good to give up.
"A gigaton of carbon here, a gigaton there -- we've got a disjunction between the rhetoric and the reality," said David Wheeler, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, a nonprofit research group in Washington that recently compiled a database of the world's 50,000 power plants.
Leading the coal spree is China, which has more than doubled its CO2 emissions from coal since 2000 to more than 2.7 billions tons a year, according to the database.
Over the last eight years, China has built 603 coal-fired generators -- 64% of the new generators installed worldwide. India has added 133 generators, according to the database.
They're not the only coal addicts.
In raw numbers, China has merely caught up to the United States, according to the database. In Europe, which has led the world in greenhouse gas reductions, coal use is expected to creep up in the next several years -- driven by rising oil and natural gas prices.
But a recent analysis by MIT climate experts found that even if the U.S. and Europe could somehow stop all their carbon emissions, the developing countries are on pace to create a climate crisis on their own.
Michael Wara, a Stanford University researcher who studies the emerging markets for greenhouse gases, said: "In 20 years, if India and China aren't on board, the game is lost."
