China is a bomb IMO. (Not the only bomb though.) The leaders are riding a horse they can't get off. Any slackening in the growth rate produces massive unemployment and upheaval. Yet the growth is totally unsustainable every which way. Unlike here, there are elderly Chinese (not even that elderly) who remember what it was like under Mao -- meager, simple, austere, but iron rice bowls, rudimentary universal health care, guaranteed minimal survival. Gone. Once the compensations of growth disappear, watch out.

These vulnerabilities are the reason the Chinese leaders put up with as much bullying from the US as they do, and continue holding a huge pile of rapidly depreciating dollars. Deadly embrace I call it.

Where else to go but coal after oil and gas become scarce? In more pessimistic moments (which stretch out into minutes, days, weeks sometimes) I think there's no hope that we'll avert worst-case scenarios of global warming and environmental devastation. Peak coal would be a blessing if it would but come on time. But it won't -- there's TOO MUCH of it. It seems that little stands in the way of our wrecking the planet.