Idiots who live hundreds and thousands of kilometers from Russia and Ukraine, of course, know better and after watching enough TV, you need to protect your unhappy Ukraine, haha.

@skybrook

I don't really care who is Left or Right.

I do, because everything is politicized now. Even the weather. Even the common cold. They've been made into political weapons by people who want to tear down civilization. ("Intent can be inferred from predictable outcomes." Noam Chomsky, 1974)

thank you for coming to our TED talk

From Google: Coal was one of man's earliest sources of heat and light. The Chinese were known to have used it more than 3,000 years ago. The first recorded discovery of coal in this country was by French explorers on the Illinois River in 1679, and the earliest recorded commercial mining occurred near Richmond, Virginia, in 1748.

Production. Total worldwide gross production of electricity in 2016 was 25,082TWh. Sources of electricity were coal and peat 38.3%, natural gas 23.1%, hydroelectric 16.6%, nuclear power 10.4%, oil 3.7%, solar/wind/geothermal/tidal/other 5.6%, biomass and waste 2.3%.

Coal has been here a long time and will continue to do so as long as there is energy demand until there is personal nuclear power generation. Solar doesn't have the power to replace coal and kills land to make a flat grid. Natural gas is limited around the world, meaning coal is an effective replacement. Oil is not used on wide scale, being more for personal use and emergencies through gasoline. Wind also kills land and shuts itself down for maintenance on the regular. Biomass and waste can't meet demand. Nuclear is the only replacement option for coal unless mankind decides that power is no longer needed, which would cripple the economy of basically every nation on earth. Even removing the commute will not solve the power required to work from home, which will use energy and require coal.

Nuclear in the control of the government will have similar problems to coal as they only will invest in outdated uranium generators, which has massive nuclear waste output, dangerous mining and enrichment, and can go critical. Thorium is safer, more plentiful, more powerful, produces less waste, but is not in widespread use because of control, which any source of energy will be until it is in the hands of the people for personal energy production. This is the only means that can control waste through personal cost, as otherwise the waste cost is passed away from the public and waste is not a conscious factor. In the meantime, coal is not clean, but it is no worse than any other method for power generation save thorium nuclear energy generation, which won't be able to completely replace the energy requirements of billions of people around the world.

And for consumerism, yes, but until everyone becomes a farmer, gardener, black smith, or inventor, this life is unavoidable of consumption on some level. Using this website requires consuming energy to the server and your computer to display the image and comment section, which runs on people that need food, desire entertainment, and relies on a supply chain that is kept running through the profits of consumerism. To escape this may be necessary, but it is also the death of the economy we know unless it is transferred into the hands of the people to run locally. Though there are dangers in running locally, the effects of the generation can be known and better controlled while also not withholding anyone from the needed supply of energy to work a society devoid of the consumerist model.

Until such a day, there is few other options that don't reduce freedom of the individual drastically, such as a social credit that limits your access to energy to limit the impact to the environment, which will never be correctly justified because consumption differs from individual to individual. It is true that an individual can live with less than what is currently used, but this is something no governing body can correctly assess as some individuals will use energy for productive uses and even frivolous entertainment which can help an individual with anything from physical to mental problems. Thus, an economic model that focuses on control for the environment with top-down control will also be anti-individual and destructive to the lives of the people that can be remedied through cost being placed on the individual locally, either by energy production the individual can work themselves or local power production that can be monitored and controlled by communities instead of massive corporations that monetize the ability to enter a building and governing bodies of nations that cannot properly monitor the ability to get a driver's license.

All of that is a bit off topic.
>Imagine soviets won the cold war.
>The south seceded forming a neo-confederate state, who is getting more and more soviet alligned.
>Moreover west wirginia wanted to leave the neo-confederacy but was bombed for 8 years.
Then West Wirginia would probably not be able to do much if they were bombed for that long even if they joined the communist confederacy… such a strange metaphor. Playing who is the real nazi is cringe. Become the real nazi instead. Cute recolors though.

@Background Pony #976B

I don't really care who is Left or Right. I just think that whoever is doing all that with coal had better prove they're not carelessly poisoning everything in the process hoping to leave us to clean up the mess once their short term profits have been made. The last time they spoke of a bright future in coal, they were holding the dagger to stab us with behind their backs the whole time, so I'm not eager to repeat that catastrophe without a whole lot of public involvement, and no big money private interests in control.

Regardless of whether we can use coal though, I don't really think we need to. Most of us are only driving cars to commute and shop, to make even more money for rich people. We need to stop being so damn consumerist.

@skybrook
North America is made out of coal under a thin layer of soft yellow sandstone. There are many centuries' worth remaining, and it does not have to be used in raw form. Germany and South Africa have been making coal into motor fuel via the Fischer-Tropsch Process for generations. It can even be made into petrochemical feedstock. And that's 1930s technology. I am sure the modern age can do much better.

As for environmentalism, it's just like every other cause the Left invokes. It's a rhetorical bludgeon they use to beat people they don't like—working-class whites in Flyover Country are at the top of that list—and was never anything else. Then when it's no longer expedient or useful, it ceases to exist until it's useful to them again. Sort of like freedom of speech, democracy, equality before the law, judicial supremacy, and civil rights.

@Background Pony #976B

> permanent

See, I don't believe we need coal. We did fine before it, we just need to figure out how to live sustainably again. That doesn't mean throwing away our business to sellout profiteers in desperation. It means doing whatever it takes to ensure good lives for us and our children. That's what environmentalism is about, even if people misunderstand it. The environment is what we live in, and it's important to ensure that what we live in is livable, otherwise our lives are gonna suck.

Also we're living in Third World tier poverty because of schemes people unknowingly perpetuate that fool us all into thinking that we owe everything only to a very few. Blind pursuit of anything with a green stamp on it might be a problem if you take back the coal and the gains from it yourselves, but if you don't, environmentalists are small change compared to what you're up against. This system that puts us forever in debt while executives laugh all the way to the bank is what keeps us on welfare, not preachy vegans.

@skybrook
Given that the alternative is a choice between permanent Third World tier poverty, being on welfare forever, seeing their kids on welfare forever, and maybe dealing weed and oxycontin for extra money, and moving to a city where people get murdered in the streets on a daily basis and the teachers will groom their kids and talk them into being trannies… And "learn to code" is a punchline at this point.

And environmentalists are death-cultists. They hate Daddy, they hate civilization, and they hate working-class white people. Go to any environmentalist rally near a mine and look at all the out-of-state license plates, then ask them how they feel about the "dumb hicks" who work for a living. They will tell you without prompting.

@Background Pony #976B

Well, first off coal companies successfully destroyed all the unions, so good luck getting that back. Second off, you want your relatives working for the same people who took away their high paying jobs and left them to starve once these assholes had extracted all the profit they could? The company sacrificed the careers of those workers to protect the money of the investors, when people finally started demanding that they stop wrecking the environment. I don't know if coal is the answer, but the coal companies, and the idea of a coal company who can just dump you at the first convenience, leaving you to clean up their toxic mess are not.

I know some environmentalists are unhelpful stubborn assholes too, but you have to look at who made money off of this. There will always be people lying through their teeth, arguing for corrupt laws that screw us over, and we can fight them back, but once there's money to be made in exploitation… that's what's destroying West Virginia.

@skybrook
Not trying to be an asshole, not trying to be confrontational, but I have relatives in WV and southeastern KY. All of them want the coal companies to come back. All of them want the high-paying unionized coal mining jobs that people had back in the 70s and early 80s.

Yes, I am aware of the history of the region. People still remember the murder of Smilin' Sid Hatfield on the steps of the Matewan courthouse by hired gunmen from the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency, hired by the Stone Mountain Coal Company, for daring to refuse bribes and daring to investigate and arrest company goons. They remember the Mingo County War and the Battle of Matewan, though these are memories passed down orally of events no longer in living memory. They hate environmentalists and Clown World as much as their great-grandfathers hated the big New York and Boston companies that owned the mines. They hate for the same reason—because powerful people far away, who do not live there, who have the ear of a political class only too eager to write any law they request, made them poor, powerless, and hopeless.

So like how Russia was forced to be capitalist, the USA would be forced to be communist. The "Soviet South" = the Ukraine. And West Virginia… I hate to say it, but in reality coal companies have already done worse than bombing the shit out of that place.