Only weeks after climate change talks in Doha produced no significant plan to address climate change, the International Energy Agency said Tuesday that coal will likely rival oil as the world’s largest source of energy within five years, dramatically increasing global warming.

An Indian worker shovels coal at a depot in Siliguri on October 18, 2010. (Photo: Diptendu Dutta/AFP/Getty Images)
The report, released Tuesday by the IEA, states that while the growth of coal use is slowing “from the breakneck pace of the last decade,” global consumption by 2017 will likely increase by 1.2 billion metric tons—the amount currently consumed annually by the US and Russia alone.

Tom Zeller Jr. of the Huffington Post cites statistics from the US Energy Information Administration that coal is the leading source of planet warming emissions, accounting for more than 40 percent of all emissions, with that figure expected to increase to nearly half of global emissions over the next 25 years.

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