What should you threw a celebration to wreck the atmosphere and no person got here?
As a part of its complete assault on renewables, the Trump administration tried to get some firm someplace, wherever, to agree to purchase 167 million tons of coal, to be extracted from public land in Montana. It didn’t actually work out effectively, with the one bid being one for $186,000, or a fraction of a penny per ton.
The Division of the Inside rejected the sale, because the regulation requires bids to be at or above market worth, and the final sale within the space was for about $1.10/ton. Not that legal guidelines matter in any respect to this administration, however pretending that they do is no less than a manner for it to save lots of face after this disastrous sale try. One other proposed sale of 440 million tons of coal in Wyoming was postponed after the low Montana bid, with no phrase as to when or if it could be rescheduled.
“Winding down” by Mike Luckovich
How will the administration proceed its quest to Make Black Lung Nice Once more if it might probably’t pressure folks again into the mines? The folks yearn to expertise old-timey illnesses!
The issue for the administration is that no person actually desires coal, even utility corporations which are at present working coal crops. The corporate that made the $186,000 bid supplies gas to energy crops in Wyoming, and their crops are slated to cease burning coal within the subsequent decade.
One resolution the administration has hit on is forcing corporations to maintain their coal crops open after they had been slated to be shut down. Certain, protecting these open is unhealthy for the atmosphere, however no less than it’s additionally costlier!
The administration additionally just lately introduced that it could bathe coal plant house owners with money to maintain that soiled gas buzzing alongside, whereas additionally decreasing the royalty funds required to extract coal on federal lands.
Associated | We’re getting coal, whether or not we wish it or not
Properly, maybe they had been planning on decreasing royalty funds, however it appears nobody desires to purchase the filthy gas that’s harmful to extract when there are different, cleaner, cheaper sources, significantly renewables, obtainable.
Trump’s coal fixation is leaving America behind in vitality progress as different nations undertake renewables at breakneck pace. Trump’s bizarre hatred of renewable vitality can be set to hobble his need to have the US be nothing however AI information facilities from sea to shining sea.
JP Morgan—not precisely an organization dominated by Greta Thunberg-esque hippies bent on ramming wind down our throats—stated that with out renewables, the nation received’t have sufficient vitality for all of the racist chatbots Elon Musk must make, or no matter different AI horrors are deliberate. JP Morgan is planning to speculate $1.5 trillion in “security and resilience,” particularly in photo voltaic, wind, nuclear, and battery storage.
The horror. How dare the monetary masters of the universe not signal on to Trump’s perverse, self-defeating efforts to pressure us backward?
It seems that dragging America again into the coal age advantages nobody—not even corporations that mine coal.