“This year is on course to see the largest fall in coal consumption in history. There has been a drop of at least 2.3 per cent and possibly as much as 4.6 per cent in the January-September period, compared to the same period a year ago.”

This, Greenpeace notes, follows the levelling off of global coal use in 2014. “(It) creates a nightmare scenario for the coal industry.”

As Tim Buckley writes in a separate piece today, many in the fossil fuel industry continue to insist that the thermal coal industry holds great promise. But much of this is wishful thinking.

Even the Coalition government, accused of preventing the removal of fossil fuel subsidies which could affect financing for 1,000 new coal plants, declares a “moral” imperative to mine thermal coal.

This, of course, was accompanied by the applause of The Australian newspaper, who put the latest claims by climate contrarian Bjorn Lomborg on its front page again, and whose legal editor on Tuesday lamented the legal challenge to the Adani coal project in the Galilee Basin:

“One of the great obscenities of our time is the fact that the law of Australia is about to weight the welfare of millions against the welfare of a God-forsaken bird,” Chris Merritt wrote. Damn Mother nature! How dare it impede the fossil fuel industry!

But environmental organisations are taking such actions, not just for environmental outcomes, but also to save the coal industry from itself. It simply refuses to believe that the thermal coal industry is in danger of decline.

“Coal is in terminal decline, and those countries investing in coal for export markets are making reckless decisions,” says Lauri Myllyvirta, coal and energy campaigner for Greenpeace. “They will be scarring the landscape and damaging the climate with little prospect of a return on their investment,”

This graph illustrates why. It shows major declines in key markets such as China and the US are overwhelming smaller increases in India, and the rest of the EU (mostly eastern European states).

China – which has consumed half the world’s coal in the last decade, has been adding one coal-fired power plant a week, but also idling just as many, with the end result that coal consumption – the cause of so much pollution in the major cities – is now declining.