Michael R. Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York City, said on Friday he would donate $500 million to a new campaign to close every coal-fired power plant in the United States and halt the growth of natural gas.
The new campaign, called Beyond Carbon, is designed to help eliminate coal by focusing on state and local governments.
(The New York Times, June 7, 2019)
President Trump makes a show of declaring his love for coal. It’s his way of deluding miners into thinking that he will reverse the tide of technology to reestablish coal as a primary source of US energy:
We love clean, beautiful West Virginia coal [and] you know, that’s indestructible stuff. In times of war, in times of conflict, you can blow up those windmills, they fall down real quick … blow up pipelines, they go like this … those solar panels, but you know what you can’t hurt? You can do whatever you want to coal.
(Rolling Stone, August 22, 2018)
But miners would do well to appreciate that Trump declares his love for coal, not for them. This explains why, instead of creating more coal-mining jobs, he’s merely reversing the emissions regulations former president Barack Obama implemented.
In fact, Trump seems motivated above all by the spite that has him trying to roll back every feature of Obama’s legacy.
This is just his latest stab at either whitewashing or undermining Obama’s accomplishments. You’d be forgiven for thinking that Trump has predicated his presidency on vindicating his birther conspiracy. That, of course, is the one he peddled about Obama being an illegitimate interloper (a.k.a. an uppity African) who does not belong among the ranks of American presidents – certainly not in the top 10 as seems his destiny.
(“Trump’s Hypocrisy on Human Rights: Cuba vs Qatar,” The iPINIONS Journal, June 16, 2017)
Meanwhile, Trump has never shown any regard for the deadly impact increased CO2 could, if not will, have on the very miners he’s deluding with his sweet nothings about coal.
But, like he himself has said, Trump can do whatever he wants, consequences be damned. And, in this case, what he really wants is to give the billionaire owners of coal mines license to continue polluting for profits … to share with him in the form of 2020 campaign donations (a.k.a. kickbacks).
The only wonder is that this preternaturally thin-skinned bully has yet to fire off insulting tweets at Bloomberg for threatening to end his death dance with coal.
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