Posted on 10/21/2025 12:34:59 PM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum
What drives Trump’s politics is nostalgia for the age of coal, when dirty fuel and no environmental regulations created his version of a great America.
Arguably, no technology freed the world from the drudgery and cold of premodern times more than coal. It fueled the Industrial Revolution and rising standards of living that transformed what a human life meant after 1800. The cost of this freedom soon meant slaughtered workers, rising carbon dioxide levels, and the threat of planetary ecological catastrophe.
Today, arguably no technology dooms the world’s future more than coal, with its environmental destruction, pumping of carbon dioxide into the air, and dangerous working conditions that still kill from work, pollution, and climate change. The environmental journalist Robert Wyss provides readers an often-dramatic episodic overview of coal in American history, the great paradox between power and destruction that we could escape today, but we choose not to because of vested corporate interests and Donald Trump’s nostalgia for an America where coal burned plentifully and white men like himself ruled the world.
A cheap, plentiful energy source that could power factories anywhere provided enormous financial benefits, and coal revolutionized the global economy. Early factories relied on waterpower, clean in terms of what were then unknown carbon emissions, but limited development to waterways. Coal transformed the geography of industrialization, allowing enormous industrial operations wherever a capitalist wanted to build. It fueled steel and railroads. It heated homes—dirtily, but in a 19th-century working-class home, avoiding the cold took precedence for most family over smoke. The idea of fossil fuels raising standards of living powers the ideology of many of Trump’s energy advisers, who not coincidentally often have vested financial interests in the industry. They ignore or lie about the massive human and environmental cost.
As Wyss reminds readers repeatedly, coal’s horrors showed...
(Excerpt) Read more at msn.com ...
I have seen studies recently that removing the smoke from the air from burning coal is what caused temperatures to rise.
Look at it from a realistic point that is a fact. CO2 feeds plants and in turn plants exhale O2 which fuels humans and animals. Strange how that works especially when humans are about 20% carbon to begin with.
When a volcano blows doesn’t that burn more coal than engines?
I argue, while coal was important, petroleum has been far, far more important than coal.
...Grande Staircase Escalante
Love Scenic Byway 12
My goodness!
This has to be the worst stinking garbage bag of pure propaganda the world has ever had to endure...
So, build more Nukes.
China apparently still has coal seam wild fires that produce as much CO2 as all of the USA’s light duty vehicle fleet.
Can’t beat distilled petroleum products for portable energy storage.
**Grande Staircase Escalante**
There are huge coal fields in that area Kaiparowits Plateau, Utah, and there was plans 55 years ago to build mine-mouth plants in the area. Then it was shut down. Bill Clinton declared the area THE BEAR’S EARS NATIONAL MONUMENT and killed all those plans.
Obama tried to shut our plant down but it was so economic that our company built UN-NEEDED SCRUBBERS due to the low sulfur coal, to remove that last 2% of sulfur. It is still running but now has a 100 ft high mountain of scrubber waste where there was none for 40 years.
Sadly Page AZ and Farmington NM have destroyed their power plants.
Sure, as long as you ignore the production of steel.
I come from a very poor coal mining family, My dad was born in Rich Hill. Missouri., Just a little crossroads with, apparently, coal to mine. That’s what my grandfather did.
Dad wasn’t interested and left at 15, went to Kansas City and got a job at a Little restaurant called B/G for Buck and Gage, two men who founded it. Several years later, my dad became President of BG foods and opened restaurants from NYC to San Francisco and LA. I grew up in a Chicago suburb ranked as 7th wealthiest in the US.
My dad always said you didn’t have to work hard if you worked smart.
Mine those mountains for rare earths.🤔
Consider the corn ethanol boondoggle. Those “green” ethanol plants are belching CO2 from the fermentation of corn that another green scam is being proposed to collect this CO2 and send it by pipeline across several states to be injected deep into the ground in North Dakota.
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