I hate to throw actual science into a hate fest butt…
On a per energy basis natural gas IS better for the environment than coal. Even if you ignore the fact that when you burn coal you get all kinds of nasty shit in the air and in the residue/ash.
Coal, to a first order, is basically a pile of carbon. Burn it and you get CO2.
Natural gas is a hydrocarbon. Yeah, you are burning carbon, But you are ALSO burning a good bit of hydrogen. Which gives you water, not CO2.
Hell, we could probably make a nice dent in the impending global warming crisis is we could magically switch all fossil fuel use to natural gas vs oil/coal.
It’s also still cheaper per raw unit of energy, generally. Or else you think of that as the plug figure. Aside from govt mandates not to use coal, coal will tend to be cheaper per raw unit of energy to compensate for the fact it’s more expensive to transport (per unit energy at the margin once you build the dedicated infrastructure to transport NG), more expensive to meet environmental standards besides anti-carbon mandates/taxes, and doesn’t lend itself as easily to use in relatively low capital cost but highly efficient power plants (ie combined cycle gas turbine plants, which need significant extra bells and whistles to gasify and burn coal).
For example lately the most common type of coal in the US, subbituminous from Wyoming, costs around $0.60 per mmBtu at the mine. Natural gas front futures contract closed at $3.38 on Friday. You have to add very significantly to that cost to get that coal to any of its markets, but if will continue to be mined at that much lower price per BTU if it’s profitable. Typical eastern coal is more like $1.50-1.90 because it’s closer to its markets and has more Btu per ton, ie less transport cost for a given number of miles. However lower price (those prices were much higher a few years ago, like NG prices were) means more marginal mines closing.
And internationally NG is typically much more expensive than in the US right now. Coal might come from even longer distances, but more efficiently in ships, or it might not come from longer distances (again China, 4 billion tons a year and 3 bil more than it was only 15 yrs ago, dwarfing couple 100mil ton decline in US demand).
Interesting swings in the use of coal, as they have historic graphs going back to 1950, but the rise of Natural Gas and Petroleum over coal since 2001 is pretty clear.
And their observations and votes are cruel in nature to themselves and many, many, many others. But they don’t give a damn about that do they?
Maybe we should still have buggy whip factories to keep those buggy whips available for all. Times change. Markets change. Democrats want to give people a safety net to bridge those changes. Republicans promise them the world but just want them to be quiet and die with dignity or at least quietly with no fanfare.
Whoa, whoa, whoa. Aborted fetal tissue, no matter how developed or what the medical cause or circumstances of the abortion, will still receive some fanfare. At least in Tejas (and likely other states to come), where freedom still reigns and all life is still sacred.
Hell, with the Donald’s anti-immigration stance, it will only be a matter of time before the rest of the world retaliates, and starts putting the same draconian measures in place against Americans. So leaving the country probably wouldn’t even be an option.