China's coal consumption has been pretty much flat for the past decade. That's certainly not ideal, but it's not a rapid increase.

Where are you seeing their coal use as flat? Even the related wikipedia page[1] shows a pretty steady increase over time.

	▲	wat10000 11 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Where do you see a steady increase on that page? There’s one fairly unreadable graph at the top. Clicking through to the source for that graph, we can see that consumption was 22.8TWh in 2014 and 25.6TWh in 2024, a pretty modest increase.