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True, unless you like having electricity on nights with no wind. If you like having electricity on windless nights, you’ll need to rely on coal (and natural gas) for backup.
The Germans recently discovered that the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow, so they are building *new coal plants* to compensate.
Wow..the wind stops over the entire us? all at once? Amazing! And the entire us gets covered in clouds too? Sooo...clouds and no wind.
Your argument works fine for a house doing this, not so much for a massive country like ours. But lets say we are paranoid that such a occurrence could happen.....why would we turn to coal when natural gas is cheaper? And that right there is why coal is such nonsense for us. natural gas is cheaper.
It means that Trump supports coal obtained by the hellishly destructive mountaintop removal method, which has laid waste to untold acreage in eastern Kentucky, West Virginia, western Virginia, and eastern Tennessee. It means that he supports selling such coal to China and bragging about exporting it.
It means that he has absolutely no understanding of or interest in or concern about the true cost of such destruction.
Take a look at these areas on Google Earth if you are not familiar with mountaintop removal, which is just what it sounds like. Tops of the oldest mountains in the world are blown off by dynamite in order to get to the coal, and restoration is pathetic, with handfuls of non-native grass seed and heavy doses of fertilizer being scattered among the bare blown apart rocks and heavily bulldozed level shelves left when the mountaintop is gone.
There is no way to restore the rich and highly diverse forests which once grew there, nor can the water be adequately cleaned of the arsenic, lead, and other toxins which are exposed by the blasts and which leach into the groundwater. This practice has led to boulders rolling downhill into houses below and killing little children as they slept in their beds.
Yet mountaintop removal coal mining remains legal, and Trump terms it "beautiful".
It is used to extract coal from veins which are too small to be mined by other methods, such as deep mining or even strip mining, another extremely destructive practice. That coal was left by the deep miners because it was viewed as unreachable and/or economically unfeasible to mine. It still is economically unfeasible to mine for the domestic market, which has been heavily impacted by natural gas, but there are still markets abroad - for now. China is cleaning up its act and any sales there are likely to be very short-term.
Trump was playing to the crowd, specifically, to his WVA base, which seems to be willfully blind to the clear indications of what is coming in a very few short years.
The inhabitants of that region do not care about their environment. It’s sad. The incidence of cancer is high in those areas as well. But they don’t want to listen. They’re blissfully happy with dreams of coal and a heroin reality.
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