“We love clean, beautiful West Virginia coal,” said Trump at his West Virginia rally. “We love coal.”
You know, it’s indestructible stuff. In times of war, in times of conflict, you can blow up those windmills. They fall down real quick. You can blow up those pipelines real quick. You can do a lot of things to those solar panels, but you know what you can’t hurt, coal. You can do whatever you want to coal.
As Wired pointed out, Trump was “mocking renewable energy and natural gas, which have displaced coal in electric utilities across the US.” What’s amazing about Trump and his supporters is that they are so proud to know so little. I know that I know little, which is why I don’t go around walking and talking like Trump, and his followers. Well, maybe I do, but at least I have the common sense to understand that coal is poison. That’s more than what Trump and his followers can say.
Clean coal is such an absurd idea on just a common sense level. Just go to YouTube and type in “mountain top removal videos,” and you’ll find plenty of videos to show you just how “clean” coal is. On an “elite” level, coal is not what American citizens want. People on both sides of the aisle of politics want us to advance towards renewable energy and natural gas. Coal is a dying industry for a couple reasons. Jobs in the industry has declined because of municipalities going from coal to natural gas and renewables, and after its union’s were crushed, coal mining has been mechanized.
Furthermore, as Trump says that coal is clean, his own EPA is saying that his deregulations will kill thousands, and make millions of others sick. It’s why the EPA wrote a 289 page report, so that they could hide the fact that this deregulation is actually an externality, and that Trump’s administration doesn’t give a shit about runaway climate change. “Did you see what I did to that?” Trump said of clean power policies. “Boom, gone.”
That’s just great. As the western United States burns, as one of many examples of climate change impacting the world. Trump acts with pride of being an asteroid that took out the dinosaurs. It doesn’t matter to Trump and his base that this policy means 140,000 more children missing school each year. It doesn’t matter that from 2023 to 2037, we’ll lose $4 billion a year in net benefits. It doesn’t matter that this policies impact on the climate may easily go over $50 billion. It doesn’t matter that coal’s situation might worsen under Trump, which is fine by me. Hell, it doesn’t matter that Trump’s policy is going to kill people.
Our culture’s inability to tackle the reality of climate change has probably passed the point of no return. It’s why Obama’s very moderate policies can be easily destroyed by the next administration. Paul Bunyan is an American folk legend for a reason. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Organization’s role is to manage the National Weather Service, and to forecast effects from climate change. Not anymore. Under Trump’s administration, their priority is “accurate, reliable and timely environmental information,” for “a safe, secure and growing economy.” Never mind that an economic system of constant growth on a finite planet is utterly insane, or that we have the Eastern Islander’s to prove this, let’s keep “progressing” forward to oblivion.
Our culture is irrational, and Trump is the microcosm of a situation that plagues America writ large. Trump is irrational and supported by others whom are irrational, but this speaks for our culture as a whole.
As noted by author and journalist, Chris Hedges:
The failure to act to ameliorate global warming exposes the myth of human progress and the illusion that we are rational creatures. We ignore the wisdom of the past and the stark scientific facts before us. We are entranced by electronic hallucinations and burlesque acts, including those emanating from the centers of power, and this ensures our doom. Speak this unpleasant truth and you are condemned by much of society. The mania for hope and magical thinking is as seductive in the Industrial Age as it was in pre-modern societies.
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