Why do Republican politicians keep on lying
to voters in coal country about the reality of coal — what’s left in the ground is likely to stay there — and fail to point the way to the obvious answer to the great pain in families left in the Rust Belt region, now decimated by the shift in energy production here in the United States?
On “All in with Chris Hayes” on MSNBC in a one-on-one interview with Chris, the former Vice President and climate change cassandra, Al Gore, said that last year (2016) that renewable energy production made up 75% of all new production. Coal made up Zero percent. Gas was the filler in that sandwich.
Zero percent coal. That’s the future of coal in America and the wider world, too. It has no place there.
What about all of the families who’ve lost their way of life
along with their jobs in the Rust Belt and other former manufacturing areas across the United States? What are they supposed to do, go look for a greeter job at Walmart? They need real jobs to replace the one now long gone and not coming back.
The trick is in how to make those new jobs appear in the right places.
Which is where Congress and the Governors of those states hit hard with the slow death spiral of coal come in. They should create a Public/Private consortium to fund and build renewable energy production in these states. Solar collection panel ‘farms’ and wind turbine ‘farms’.
It will create initial jobs to build the facilities to create the machinery of the Solar Panels and the Wind Turbines. Then jobs to work in those facilities (granted, much of this will be automated, it’s the future that comes with the cleaner energy) and jobs to install and maintain that machinery everywhere it goes (long term and lots of jobs in these areas). Jobs to market and sell the machinery and the power it produces. Jobs in expansion of the national power grids.
Secondary investment into more powerful and less costly energy storage, so that loss of the sun at dusk each day or low wind days doesn’t mean an end to the power in the grids.
If these Republicans would stop trying to protect
the companies currently still in Coal and tell them to shift investment NOW into cleaner energy? If they would pursue and complete a Public/Private consortium to roll out new manufacturing and new energy production and new energy storage and transmission?
The rest of the country might stop loathing them all so much.
And their Base could go back to their barcaloungers and their NASCAR and ball games, and stop going into hysterics over the number of people of color in their states and towns now, as compared to their own childhood. They’ll have good paying jobs again and no reason to feel so anxious and nervous about the future.
And the entire nation will be safer, due to less chances of toxic derailment of coal or petroleum trains. Because there will be less and less of them, until one day, there are none of them.
The way it should be.