Indeed. We should also be more willing to celebrate our environmental accomplishments. Unlike GW, smog and acid rain were real problems making life worse for Americans.
It was in the 1980s under Reagan and then Bush that we brought in sensible regulations to solve those problems.
Absolutely right. Nobody celebrates electricity or contemplates life without it. Life was 95% drudgery and toil just to survive before electricity.
I spent five years starting up new utility and industrial boilers. Then I spent the next 20 years doing R&D on new energy systems. The advent of SO2 scrubbers, baghouses to remove almost all fly ash from the exhaust gases, and selective catalytic reactors to reduce NOx made coal power plants extremely clean. Sulfur, nitrogen oxides and particulate matter were very serious problems, but they were solved.
People alive today don’t believe how clean coal plants truly are and, because they have been brainwashed to believe CO2 is a “pollutant,” they think coal is very dirty.