Friday, June 09, 2017

We can't rewind, we've gone too far

It has been a few days since the president theatrically announced that he is pulling the United States out of the Paris agreement on climate change.  I cannot even begin to understand his (ill)logic!

I am increasingly reminded of my younger days in the old country, when politicians would simply lie through their teeth and say whatever they needed to say in order to get the votes.  As a tween and as a teenager, I would read Thuklak and laugh at the idiot politicians, but fully aware that I--like most others--was being screwed.

It is one thing when a local DMK or an ADMK thalaivar entertains the crowd in the nearby maidan with his lies, but it is another when it is the president of the US--words have global implications in trump's case.

If trump wants to continue believing that coal will come back, whatever happened to the brains of the rest of the GOP leaders?  Are they all zombies now?

Here in the real world, the data and the trends have been so clear for so long:
The coal-mining jobs that President Trump thinks were destroyed by government regulation — adopted to combat air pollution and global warming — were actually lost to old-fashioned competition from other American firms and workers. Eastern coal mines lost market share to Western coal, which was cheaper. And natural gas grew at coal’s expense because it had low costs and lower greenhouse gas emissions.
That’s the conclusion of a new study by economist Charles Kolstad of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research ...
Government isn’t killing the coal industry. “Progress is the culprit,” concludes Kolstad’s study.
How much more clearer and simpler should this message be for the GOP idiots to understand?

Source
Technological progress happens.  And we are thankful for it.  Well, unless your livelihood depended on, say, renting video tapes of movies!  Without the technological progress, trump would not have Twitter, and he would, not have become president either back when coal was king!


2 comments:

Ramesh said...

They'll never understand. Because its not that they do not know. The know. But power at any price ..........

The coal jobs are never going to come back. I suspect even the Trump voters knew that. They just revelled in saying "Screw You" !

Sriram Khé said...

Yes, the crazy thing is that most of the coal workers and people in the coal community seem to be well aware of coal not ever coming back big time ... yet, they gladly--and their enthusiasm for trump is real--voted for trump!
Check out this NPR report:
https://n.pr/2sPDFIm