What is dirty is cheap

"Worldwide, we've built more coal-burning power plants in the past decade than in any previous decade, and closures of old plants aren't keeping pace with this expansion," said  Prof Steven Davis at University of California, Irvine. "Far from solving the climate change problem, we're investing heavily in technologies that make the problem worse," he said. 

Almost the entire developing world is looking to coal as the power plant fuel of choice on the road to industrialisation.

The climate impacts of the world's fossil-fuelled power plants are being underestimated because of poor accounting, say researchers. Researchers calculated that the new coal and gas plants built in 2012 with an expected production life of 40 years, would in total, produce around 19bn tonnes of CO2. This is significantly more than the 14bn tonnes produced by all the existing fossil fuel plants in the world in the same year. All the existing fossil fuel plants in world will contribute 300bn tonnes of CO2 over their lifetimes.

"We've been hiding things from ourselves," said  Prof Robert Socolow from Princeton university.