The fundamental problem is there’s no demand for coal - and that’s in large part because so many coal-fired power plants have been decommissioned and replaced by natural gas burners, etc. So even weighing down other types of fossil fuels with burdens to make them relatively uncompetitive would just raise energy prices, not revitalize coal. Never mind the fact that solar now employs more Americans than coal does anyways…
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Exactly! Let’s never mind that! La la la! Can’t hear you!
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So it seems that push back works, at least sometimes.
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You mean… exactly what congress has been doing, likely as a tradition going back to the second president? Whenever parts of government don’t align, there are struggles where people will drag their feet hoping that if they take long enough, it will blow over before they actually have to do what they are obliged to do. The problem you are describing has existed as long as bureaucracy has been around.
And in this case there are two reasons that I can get behind this exercise of bureaucratic power:
- There are things at stake here for every last person on this planet, all of whom will experience the effects of climate change.
- The cabinet picks by the President Elect (Which is not the same as President) show a clear pattern of directly undermining the positions that they are suppose to hold as to make them useless. This is top down regulatory capture.This is the systemic destruction of every agency meant to protect the people and we should resist it with all our might.
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Yes, but can it attached against The Empire?
That might matter if this were really about employment.
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If that person “has a brain” they won’t just call for the names and heads of their enemies, they’ll make careful, legal arguments for the illegality/unconstiutionality of activities, and remove people, and charge any of them who have committed crimes with actual crimes in an actual court. Last I checked “believing in climate change” is not a crime in any sense of the word. Torture, illegal surveillance, locking up disabled people, destroying wheelchairs, stealing massive amounts of property, etc… are.
It’s a strange hypothetical to pose, and summons up an image that certainly isn’t make of bricks or sticks…
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This should really be the topic of a front-line @boing article. A guide to using Tea Party tactics to oppose Trump’s agenda:
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I agree that there is really no demand for coal, but the causes are a lot broader than the simple economics of the cost of gas vs. coal. Just a month ago France said it would eventually close all it’s coal plants, and if I’m not mistaken a year or two ago the World Bank said that it would no longer finance coal-burning power plants. So there are a lot of macro economics at play, too.
I live in a coal state, and it is in such deep, deep denial it’s surreal. Kind of in the same way much of the country is in deep denial over manufacturing jobs (they are being largely replaced by automation and even if they came back, they really aren’t living-wage jobs anymore, but everyone in the rust belt prefers the narrative of the jobs being taken only by globalization (which is a part, but only a small one) because it’s an easier pill to swallow.)
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Yeah, there are various reasons why coal has fallen out of favor, and various reasons why coal-fired plants have been replaced, but the fact that they have been replaced becomes an insurmountable stumbling block - even if Trump somehow had the power to build new coal plants to create more demand for coal, it still couldn’t happen in four years. The fact that natural gas is so cheap right now also knocked the bottom out of a number of fossil fuels - and that by itself screws up coal, even if these other things weren’t also happening.
I’m rather shocked by how ignorant the inhabitants of coal country are about their plight. I’ve been reading all these people blaming Obama, apparently completely unaware of the very easy-to-understand economic forces which are having the biggest impact on their economy. You’d think that people would have the most rudimentary understanding of the issues that control their lives at least, just so they can at least have a vaguely relevant response to change. I guess on some level they do understand the forces, but that they’re beyond their ability to address, so thus the denial. Other narratives become appealing, as they give a false hope of control. I suppose it doesn’t help that they’re being screwed over by the same economic forces that Republicans have brainwashed people into accepting, so it’s another thing to be in denial about.
Manufacturing is somewhat more complicated by people telling outright lies, e.g. “America doesn’t make stuff anymore.” People don’t realize that the US makes twice as much stuff as it did when it had peak employment in manufacturing. Also, there’s no hard reason for that to be the case - Germany, for instance, has laws about automation that means when it automates, no jobs are lost, which has meant that workers have themselves often been the ones proposing automation and it’s increased their productivity while keeping employment high. The people who want their manufacturing jobs “back” are often the same ones skeptical of the kinds of regulations that would have kept the jobs in the first place…
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I actually give them a bit of a pass. Who shocks me are the legislators. If they cared one whit about their citizens or the future of their state, they would begin to address the fundamental issues (not that I know even how that would be done). But they just keep telling folks “we’ll get coal back!” and they keep getting elected.
But to be honest, even this shouldn’t be surprising. Look, for example, at who West Virginia just elected as Governor: Jim Justice, richest man in WV.
His money came from coal, of course.
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Now, that doesn’t shock me. Shameless demagoguery sadly works for politicians, as we’ve seen. Addressing the issues in a reality-based way seems like a sure way of preventing yourself from getting elected when the population isn’t educated about the issues. And, as your example shows, politicians who don’t care about their states or their citizens have sadly never been rare.
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