Not only has Donald Trump failed to save the coal industry, but more plants have closed during his first year in office than in the entire first term of the Obama presidency.

Courtesy of Green Tech Media: 

In his first State of the Union address, Trump declared that “we have ended the war on American energy, and we have ended the war on beautiful, clean coal.” 

According to the Sierra Club, though, more coal capacity closed in the first 45 days of 2018 than in Obama’s entire first term. 

The organization, which has made it part of its mission to shutter coal plants, said it's on track to close the country’s 262 remaining plants over the next decade. So far, the Sierra Club says efforts to close coal plants have prevented over 7,000 premature deaths and stopped over 120,000 asthma attacks, largely in marginalized communities overburdened by pollution. 

Blair Zimmerman, a former coal miner and current county commissioner in Greene County, Pennsylvania, where the 4 West Mine closed in January, said the Trump administration hasn’t made any measurable impacts in that rural area. 

"There's not been any significant change in the industry since he's taken over,” he told CNN.

Obviously I think that anybody who voted for Donald Trump is a fucking moron.

But there is perhaps no group of idiots as ignorant as the coal mining folk who really believed that Trump had any interest in saving a dying industry.

Trump lies, that's what he does.

How is it that people had such difficulty understanding that?

John Oliver challenges Donald Trump's ability to keep his promise to bring back coal jobs and it is glorious.

Courtesy of the LA Times:  

Setting aside the "fact that [coal] is environmentally catastrophic," Oliver argued that Trump is less concerned with helping coal miners than in bolstering the coal industry -- two groups whose interests do not always align. With assistance from a giant talking squirrel, naturally, he focused on "the divide that can exist between a coal company’s interests and those of its workers." 

Oliver conceded that while coal jobs declined under President Obama, it was merely the continuation of a decades-long decline caused by a number of factors, including declining use and mechanization. 

These jobs have been disappearing "at roughly the same rate as careers in the zeppelin industry and babies named Adolf." 

Oliver has done some amazing segments on The Last Word, but I have to say that this was one of his very best.

Made even more so by the fact that he was threatened with a lawsuit by coal mining CEP Bob Murray telling him not to air it.

Once again Oliver delivers solid journalism interwoven with genuinely funny jokes a to tell a complicated story in an interesting and entertaining manner.

Excellent job and I cannot recommend it enough.

Last night Bill Maher addressed progress and the jobs we will never, and should never, see again.

I thought last night's show was pretty entertaining, though I could have done without that Breitbart apologist coming on and attempting to suggest that his website does the country a service by covering the news stories that the MSM will not cover.

In other words the fake ones.

However apparently he got schooled by intelligence analyst Malcom Nance who demanded an apology for a false article on Breitbart that resulted in he and his family receiving 31 death threats. 

That's right, nobody ever sheds a tear for the lost Blockbuster jobs.

So I saw this the other day on Reddit, and like a lot of you I thought it was pretty funny.

But then I started to think that it was also a great commentary on progress and the importance that folks place on only certain lost jobs from certain industries.

Now I was not sure if Blockbuster ever really had a workforce of 60,000, but as it turns out it did: 

At its peak in 2004, Blockbuster had 60,000 employees and 9,000 stores worldwide with a market value of $5 billion and revenues of $5.9 billion. 

So the meme is accurate in that regard.

However its larger point is that changes in technology, consumer tastes, and even government regulations often means the loss of certain jobs that communities have relied upon.

The example that always occurs to me is the impact that automobiles had on the buggy manufacturers, not to mention the ranchers who raised horses to pull them, and the farmers who grew hay to feed those horses.

That is at least three industries that suffered in the wake of the new technology, and yet I would bet that very, very few of us are sorry that those advances were made.

So yes coal miners are going to lose their jobs, and in the short run that is going to cause a negative economic impact to those families and to the states that rely on that industry.

However in a hundred years from now will any of our great, great grandchildren REALLY shed a tear for the coal industry or regret the move toward renewable clean energy sources?

No, I seriously doubt that they will.

Besides that you can bet that in a hundred years Netflix will have gone the way of Blockbuster and there will be some new entertainment giant that has taken its place. (Probably one that sends movies and television shows straight into our brains via microchips we will have surgically implanted for that very purpose.)

So yes progress will continue forward, and I am sure that politicians will continue to argue against it for the sake of their constituents still laboring in the soon to be obsolete industries, but that does not mean it will not happen. Nor does it mean that it should not happen.

By the way, where is my damn flying car?