Coal produces about 75 per cent of Australia's electricity, and we have the world's fourth largest coal reserves.
Executive director of coal at the Minerals Council Australia, Greg Evans, said 150,000 Australians were employed directly and indirectly by the coal industry, which pays about $6 billion in wages.
"New South Wales is 87 per cent coal, Victoria, 86 per cent and Queensland 65 per cent, so clearly, those major states are heavily reliant on coal for affordable, accessible energy and that has built a lot of our economic prosperity over the past 50 years," he said.
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As an export industry, coal is worth about $40 billion to the economy, and general manager of industry body the International Energy Agency, Dr Andrew Minchener, believes it until at least 2040.
"If you consider the growth in birth rate in much of the world, increasing urbanisation in a lot of the developing countries, and so on and so forth, {it will continue to play a vital role]".
"If we can achieve a two-degree scenario - [a] limit of two degrees on the global temperature rise - you'll still be looking at something like 44 per cent of the energy mix in the world still coming from fossil fuels, whether that's coal, oil or gas."
The Minerals Council says efforts are being made to reduce coal's impact on the environment, including through carbon capture storage to compress carbon dioxide before it's emitted into the atmosphere.
Sophisticated new plants can also reduce emissions by about 40 per cent compared to current technology, the Mineral Council's Mr Evans said.
They're not yet in place in Australia, but neighbouring regions were aiming to build them, he added.
"There's this big change happening with respect to power generation in Asia, and that's the construction of highly efficient, cleaner efficient power stations, which will actually substantially reduce emissions," he said.
"These are the so-called super critical and ultra-super critical [plants]."
Exporting to Asia 'may exacerbate global warming'
The Climate Institute's deputy chief executive, Erwin Jackson, said supplying coal to the Asian market will only intensify the effects of global warming.
"The coal industry often says, for example, that we need to burn lots of coal to bring people out of poverty, but if we burn lots of coal, we're going to exacerbate poverty problems in developing nations because they're going to be the hardest hit by climate impacts," he said.
The Climate Institute believes achieving a net-zero emissions economy over coming decades .
"It's more political - so we need political leadership from both sides of politics, to put in place the policies, to unleash the billions of dollars of investments that's going to come from the private sector in that transition," Mr Jackson said.
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Some argue economic growth can only be achieved by cutting back on coal.
Mark Fulton from financial think tank 'The Carbon Tracker' said while the demand for - essential in steel manufacturing - , the industry had overestimated demand of power-producing which could lead to excess supply.
"There's simply large amounts of coal supply available," he said.
"We don't need to open up more, drive the price down and destabilise the industry and indeed the climate, by producing lots more carbon.
"So the simple message is, Australia needs to look at other ways to earn its export earnings, for economic reasons, not for moral reasons."
Mr Jackson said that needed to come in the way of renewable energy, predominantly wind and solar power, and Australia needed to act quickly to ensure the nation doesn't suffer economically and environmentally.
"The big risk for Australia - because we have traditionally been very dependent on coal - is, as the world moves around it, we will be left with a stranded, polluting economy and a product which no one wants to buy anymore," he said.
Sarah Abo’s trip to Paris was supported by the World Meteorological Organisation.
