PR campaigns to millennials won't change the fact that coal's future is dead

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

Suppose you left on a trip for a couple days. You return to find out your roommate had thrown a huge party, trashed the place, and left it for you to clean up. Worse, you find out he had billed the booze to your bank account. How would you react when he sidles up to you encouraging you to take another trip? Probably about as well as millennials are reacting to the administration’s latest attempts to sell them on the idea that coal is “cool.”

A Department of Energy official recently trotted out this line at a coal conference: “We don’t have that many young people in this room and we need them … to understand that coal is important and vital to our economy.” Good luck with that. Set aside for the moment that coal jobs are dwarfed by renewable jobs in the US. Recent GOP firm polling showed majorities of self-identified conservative millennials favoring clean energy — with 58 percent saying they are less likely to vote for a candidate who opposes the development or use of clean energy. Among the larger population of millennials, nearly 80 percent feel that pro-clean energy candidates care more about their families’ future.

Trump’s commitment to this dying industry isn’t new news, but it is disconcerting. America has always been a forward-looking nation, where people took pride in letting the next generation stand on our shoulders.

Now, politicians determined to expand their culture war politics to courting catastrophic climate change are digging a hole that the next generation will have a hard time climbing out of. The fact is, the bills will come due (they’ve already started), and it’s going to hurt. Millennials recognize that this is a totally avoidable crisis.

And for what? So a few more Trump supporting fossil-fuel plutocrats can add another zero to their bank account? The only jobs created by the administration’s “pro-coal” agenda have been in the boardrooms of coal companies and their K Street lobby shops. Oh, and their high-flying administration enablers like Scott Pruitt and Ryan Zinke.

http://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/389196-pr-campaigns-to-millennials-wont-change-the-fact-that-coals-future

[DBoon]

1. How about an artisanal cocktail called the "clean coal"?

Garnished with a lump of anthracite

[TlalocW]

2. I honestly think that coal-miners suffer from a combination of mental problems

First the delusion that their jobs are quintessentially American and deserve special protection and second, Stockholm Syndrome in regards to their bosses, the coal mine owners (and the politicians in their pockets), who screw them over time and again. If a retraining program that worked 100% of the time in getting coal miners better jobs with great health insurance, increased pay, and good benefits were created, they wouldn't be interested, partly because it would most likely come from democrats, and two, "Well, muh daddy and muh daddy's daddy and his daddy all worked in the mine, and dangnabit, Ahm gonna work there too cuz this is 'Murica, and ain't nothin' more 'Murican than coal!"

TlalocW