Posted on 05/09/2017 7:31:05 AM PDT by Louis Foxwell
Main Menu Bloombergs Green vs Coal Miners Coal is up and Green is down. May 9, 2017 Daniel Greenfield
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam.
Michael Bloomberg is polluting bookstore shelves with a new book. After only a few weeks, Climate of Hope has already been discounted by 10 bucks despite the pull quotes from Al Gore, Bill Gates, Tom Friedman and Leonardo DeCaprio.
Maybe there just isnt a market for books with Bloombergs sour mug on the cover. Even DeCaprios freshman composition assuring us that, Bloomberg and Pope have been leaders on fortifying our cities against this threat, and their book proves that victory is possible―and imperative hasnt been enough.
So Bloomberg decided to promote his book by bashing coal miners.
"Market forces are sending coal the way of asbestos," Bloomberg rants. "Putting coal miners back to work is no more possible from a business standpoint than putting telegraph operators back to work taking Morse code or putting Eastman Kodak employees back to work manufacturing film rolls."
Or saving dead tree copies of Climate of Hope from their inevitable destination in the Green landfills of tomorrow. But at least Bloomberg had found something that he hates even more than large sodas.
Around the same time that Michael Bloomberg was peddling this claim in the dead tree pages of the Washington Post, Bloomberg, his own site, was reporting that Coal country is back.as the market value of publicly traded U.S. coal companies had doubled to $15 billion.
According to Bloomberg, the site, Miners are snagging $1,000 signing bonuses, fully paid health insurance and raises again. According to Bloomberg, the man, coal is a con and what you have to do is help them train for other jobs because those jobs arent going to come back. According to Bloomberg, the site, "Americas Biggest Coal Miner Is Joining the Comeback Under Trump".
Whom are you going to believe? Bloomberg or Bloomberg?
While Bloomberg is still insisting that coal is doomed, it was investments in Big Green that fell almost a quarter last year. Maybe we should approach this and say the glass is half full, he commented.
Who is conning whom again?
Bloomberg, the man, is rather invested in Big Green. Bloomberg New Energy Finance is built around it. Theres the businessman and the activist. And, coincidentally, they share the same agenda.
At the Washington Post, Bloomberg continues the mantra that coal is doomed and we need to help coal miners make the transition to 21st-century jobs. Like shining his shoes or taking out his trash.
Renewable investments fell $70 billion last year. The Green echo chamber, a network of sites, non-profits and activists, have spun this as best as they could. But with a new White House, the free ride is over. That means more jobs for coal miners and fewer jobs for Green spinmeisters. Coal hasnt been technologically superseded. Bloombergs analogy to telegraph operators is the real con. Instead coal was ideologically superseded by a combination of politically correct alarmism and naked profiteering.
"Politicians who ignore these market realities and make promises to coal communities they cant keep are engaged in something worse than a con. They are telling those communities... the best hope they have, and that their children have, is to be trapped in a dying industry that will poison them, Bloomberg rants.
There are two dying industries here. And neither of them involves coal.
Environmentalists and the media wanted to help coal miners by taking away their jobs. Fair is fair. We should save those workers trapped in the dying industries of the media and environmentalism.
The Washington Post, not to mention the Bloomberg magazine that shows up every week with a new garish cover, and the rest of the media are part of a dying industry. We can no more put media people back to work than we can restart the telegraph. And by funding them, we're only telling them that their best hope is to be trapped in a dying industry spewing toxic lies at America.
Environmentalism exists on a toxic mix of alarmism, theft and lies. Now that Republicans control Congress and the White House, its also a dying industry. There are only so many places outside San Francisco that are willing to shut down a project for months to the environmental consultants can maximize their fee at the expense of taxpayers. Green blackmail is deader than the Pony Express.
We need to prepare reporters and environmentalists for the jobs of the 21st century. Its too much to expect a Washington Post social justice blogger or environmental consultant to be able to handle working in a coal mine. But they can be taught to drive an Uber or leave fake reviews on Yelp.
We can retrain paid climate protesters to work in Amazon warehouses. We can pack off Paul Krugman to drive for Lyft. We can dispatch David Remnick to post applications on TaskRabbit. It will not be an easy transition. But the rest of the country cant wait for the media and the environmentalists to catch up. Nor can we allow them to continue poisoning our country with their toxic greed and lies.
And Bloomberg?
We can help transition him to a rewarding 21st century career as a soda jerk through the hot new app, FIZZ. FIZZ promises concierge soda-making service in the convenience of your own home. If nothing else, it might stop him from putting out the sequel to Climate of Hope, Iceberg of Optimism.
Coal miners have spent a long time living with condescending lectures about a dying industry from bicoastal elites who think that meat comes from a supermarket and energy comes from a logo. The left doesnt just suffer from an ideological bubble, but from a cultural bubble. It has no idea how things actually work in the real world. It equates progress with shiny things. Solar panels are shiny. Coal isnt.
It doesnt understand that those shiny solar panels and wind turbines still have to be manufactured in a dirty process by men. Renewable energy is still built out of minerals and metals. The quartz that makes a solar panel begins in a mine. So does the iron that makes the steel in a wind turbine.
Just like a coal mine.
All the shiny things of the 21st century, from microchips to solar panels, begin deep in a mine. Men descend down into the earth for the dirty brown business of digging them up
The false sophistication of urban elites measures the cleanliness of a product by how many steps lie between its origins and its present state. Solar panels look nothing like a mine. Just as a meal at a hipster hangout looks nothing like a bleeding cow. Green Energy, Clean Energy and any other euphemism is the illusion of cleanness so valued by urban elites who dont want to know where it all comes from.
It doesnt come from the air or from the sun. Claiming that Clean Energy comes from the air or the sun is as silly as insisting that coal comes from the second law of thermodynamics. Its how we harvest the energy that counts. And there is no magical clean and green way to do that. Coal is as renewable as high purity quartz. And we have more locations for coal than we do for high purity quartz.
Burning coal is as natural as any other form of energy production. The Burning Mountain in Australia, a coal seam fire, has been going for some 6,000 years. Itll be going when the archeologists of the far future are puzzling over fossilized copies of Climate of Hope and trying to understand why the men of the distant past thought that the sky was about to fall. And the answer is a mix of stupidity and greed.
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam.
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Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam.
To get on or off the Greenfield ping list please reply to this post.
The free market is the best Judge,
Of the People’s thoughts on Global,
Warming, Cooling, Climate Change,
(A Disaster, like Chernobyl!!!)
The only “Change” they’re gonna get,
Is when their books go Mobile,
And gravitate with labels changed,
To the Bargain Bin at Barnes and Noble.
To Bloomberg and his ilk, I say: Claptrap.
Unless it's anthracite.
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