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?

Las Vegas becomes the largest American city to switch to 100% green energy.

Courtesy of the Independent:

Last week, Las Vegas reached its decade-long goal of completely powering the city with renewable energy, making it the largest city in the United States to do so. 

“Las Vegas is one of the few cities in the entire world that can boast using all of its power from green sources,” Mayor Carolyn Goodman told reporters at city hall last Monday. 

The city reached the goal thanks to the opening of Boulder Solar 1, a 100-megawatt solar plant located near Boulder City. Now, the city’s government buildings, streetlights, and parks are fueled the renewable energy.

Apparently the city has been working toward this goal since 2008, and  have now reduced energy emissions by 30%.

And this Sarah Palin is why we do not need to spend billions on oil exploration in the Arctic.

Thank you President Obama.

47 of the world's poorest countries are committed to going 100% green between 2030 and 2050.

Courtesy of BBC: 

Bangladesh, Ethiopia, and Haiti, among others, say they will update their national plans on cutting carbon before 2020. 

Delegates here welcomed the move, saying it was "inspirational". 

These two weeks of negotiations have been overshadowed to an extent by reaction to the election of Donald Trump to the US presidency. 

But in an effort to show that even the world's poorest countries are committed to dealing with global warming, the Climate Vulnerable Forum (CVF) members have issued a promise to fully green their economies between 2030 and 2050. 

Termed the Marrakech Vision, the plan promises that the 47 members will: "strive to meet 100% domestic renewable energy production as rapidly as possible, while working to end energy poverty and protect water and food security, taking into consideration national circumstances".

Well look at that. The poorest nations on the planet are working to save the planet, while in America we just voted in a guy who thinks that climate change is a Chinese hoax. 

Once again the world moves forward, while America trips over its own feet.

We are slowly moving towards cars that run on green energy but the Netherlands is tired of waiting.

Courtesy of Quartz: 

Gasoline-powered cars may soon be a thing of the past. But the Netherlands wants to get there quicker. 

The Dutch government is debating the possibility of banning new gas and diesel cars from 2025. The initial proposal, which was brought forward by the Labor Party, called for an outright ban of all petrol and diesel cars, but was eventually modified so the ban only affected the sale of new petrol and diesel cars. Traditional cars already in use will still run on the streets. 

The proposal has since passed in the lower house of the Netherlands’ parliament. It now needs to pass through the Dutch senate. 

The Netherlands already has one of the lowest levels of CO2 emissions from new cars in the European Union. The country has seen a recent surge in electric car sales, which reached an all-time high last December.

Just a reminder to Americans that in many cases we are falling far behind the times.

I love stories like this which talk about our future. It just gives me such hope.

Since this is a political blog it should be noted that our current President has done a great deal to push toward clean energy in this country.

And it should be noted that Hillary Clinton has promised to do even more.

Yes, the future is looking bright indeed.

President Obama to designate vast areas of ANWR as wilderness area. Oh that should go over well up here.

Courtesy of the AP:  

President Barack Obama is proposing to designate the vast majority of Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as a wilderness area, including its potentially oil-rich coastal plain, drawing an angry response from top state elected officials who see it as a land grab by the federal government.

The designation would set aside an additional nearly 12.3 million acres as wilderness, including the coastal plain near Alaska's northeast corner, giving it the highest degree of federal protection available to public lands. More than 7 million acres of the refuge currently are managed as wilderness.

Do you think anybody will protest that decision?

Yep.

 "They've decided that today was the day that they were going to declare war on Alaska. Well, we are ready to engage," said U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, and chair of the Senate energy committee.

Trust me Murkowski is not alone, EVERY SINGLE Alaskan politician is going to come out against this decision, and if Mark Begich were still in the Senate he would as well.

You simply cannot get elected up here unless you support drilling in ANWR. Period.

However as a citizen of this state, and of the world, I completely support this decision and recognize that it is really the only intelligent way to go.

Remember according to scientists we actually need to leave all of the untapped oil resources exactly where they are if we have any hope of saving ourselves and out planet.

Trust me as an Alaskan I know all too well that we are almost completely reliant on oil money for survival, but the future is all about change and in order to survive, and this is not hyperbole, we must change as well.

Hey remember how the Republicans said that Obama's decision to invest in green energy was the worst thing he had done to the country since getting himself elected? Well guess what.

Courtesy of International Business Times:  

A US government renewable energy programme described by Republicans as "disgusting" and "a colossal failure" has turned a profit for the first time. 

The Loans Program Office became a stick to beat President Barack Obama with during the campaigning for the 2012 election, after the solar energy company Solyndra defaulted on a $535m loan it received from the Department of Energy. 

It was followed into bankruptcy by start-ups Fisker Automotive and Abound Solar, all of which received loans from the office. 

Now, it has reported a profit of $30m, after collecting interest payments of $810m on total loans of $34.2bn, Reuters reports.

Well looky there. Another Obama failure refuses to actually, you know,  fail. 

Conservatives are now modifying their diesel trucks into "coal rollers" which purposefully emit more pollutant in order to piss off liberals. WTF?

Courtesy of Business Insider:

"Coal Rollers" are diesel trucks modified with chimneys and equipment that can force extra fuel into the engine causing dark black smoke to pour out of the chimney stacks. These modifications are not new, but as Slate's Dave Weigel pointed out on Thursday, "rolling coal" has begun to take on a political dimension with pickup drivers increasingly viewing their smokestacks as a form of protest against environmentalists and Obama administration emissions regulations. 

Last month, Vocativ noted many coal rollers focus their fumes on "nature nuffies," or people who drive hybrids, and "rice burners," or Japanese-made cars. 

 "The feeling around here is that everyone who drives a small car is a liberal," a roller named Ryan told Vocativ. "I rolled coal on a Prius once just because they were tailing me." 

Here is how one salesperson explained it:  

"I run into a lot of people that really don’t like Obama at all," the salesperson said. "If he’s into the environment, if he’s into this or that, we’re not. I hear a lot of that. To get a single stack on my truck—that’s my way of giving them the finger. You want clean air and a tiny carbon footprint? Well, screw you." 

If that does not infuriate you enough take a look at one of these "cola rollers" in action.

Courtesy of Slate:  

At 23 seconds, the engine revs and the viewer finally learns what the arrows were pointing at. Smoke pours out of dual stacks, right in the path of the Prius, which retreats into the rear view. The truck’s passengers share a well-earned chortle. 

“Alright, enough!” says one of them. 

“You got ’im!” says another. 

“We got ’im!” says a co-conspirator.

Yep this is what the people who want to improve the planet for their children, and protect them from an environmental disaster, are up against. 

And they vote too.

Fox News attempts to explain the gap between Germany's highly successful solar energy industry, as opposed to America's lackluster one, on the fact that Germany is sunnier than the US. I kid you not.

Courtesy of Slate:

Thanks to Fox News and its expert commentators, millions of Americans now understand the real, hidden reason why Germany's solar-energy industry is so much further along than ours. Turns out it has nothing to do with the fact that Germany's government has long supported the industry far more generously, with policies like feed-in tariffs that stimulate investment in green technologies. No, the real reason is much simpler, explained a trio of journalists on Fox & Friends: It's always sunny in Germany! 

"The industry's future looks dim," intoned host Gretchen Carlson at the beginning of the segment, which was preserved for posterity by the liberal blog Media Matters for America. She and her co-host went on to ridicule Obama's "failed" solar subsidies, adding, "The United States simply hasn't figured out how to do solar cheaply and effectively. You look at the country of Germany, it's working out great for them." Near the end of the segment, it occurred to Carlson to ask her expert guest, Fox Business reporter Shibani Joshi, why it might be that Germany's solar-power sector is doing so much better. "What was Germany doing correct? Are they just a smaller country, and that made it more feasible?" Carlson asked. 

Joshi's jaw-dropping response: "They're a smaller country, and they've got lots of sun. Right? They've got a lot more sun than we do." In case that wasn't clear enough for some viewers, Joshi went on: "The problem is it's a cloudy day and it's raining, you're not gonna have it." Sure, California might get sun now and then, Joshi conceded, "but here on the East Coast, it's just not going to work." 

Wouldn't you think that some scientist, somewhere, would have noticed that the East Coast is far less sunny than Central Europe and therefore incapable of producing solar power on the same scale? 

You would—if it were true. As Media Matters' Max Greenberg notes, it isn't. Not even remotely. According to maps put out by the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory, virtually the entirety of the continental United States gets more sun than even the sunniest part of Germany. In fact, NREL senior scientist Sarah Kurtz said via email, "Germany's solar resource is akin to Alaska's," the U.S. state with by far the lowest annual average of direct solar energy.

As we have reported earlier this week, there are fewer and fewer people who trust Fox News these days, but that is not the only place that puts out this kind of anti-green energy propaganda.

There are also many Republican members of Congress and the Senate whose campaigns were largely funded by energy companies, and their supporters, for the sole purpose of fighting the inevitable move toward solar energy and renewable energy sources which is really what's at the heart of our sluggishness in moving that direction.

Of course the energy companies have far more insidious methods for fighting the move away from fossil fuels as well.

If you happened to watch the documentary Jesus Camp you probably saw this scene where the mom was homeschooling her son and teaching him that global warming was a fraud and only used as a political tactic. You KNOW that is something that the oil companies paid to have put in those books in order to indoctrinate children into believing that green energy is an unnecessary waste of money, just like those folks in the Fox and Friends clip above would also have you believe.

By the way. my daughter is a HUGE proponent of green energy, and would like all of you to know that many people in Alaska DO have solar panels in their homes that work quite well.