Beautiful mining accidents? Beautiful exploding mountaintops? Beautiful polluted rivers and streams? Beautiful particulate caused asthma? Beautiful waste and disposal issues?
It's impressive how sincerely Trump can use words like "clean" and "beautiful" in such a bigly and hugely opposite manner of all past precedent. He's going to give the OED practical usage team some homework.
Anyway, I'd like to implore Trump to revise his earlier tweet. It's fake news. The first thing Trump is going to need to do is to acknowledge that the war on coal has not "ended," it has just begun. And so has the war on natural gas and fracking. Actually, the term "war" is a bit violent for something so positive . . . for a transition to something so clean and beautiful. And cheap. America loves cheap. If Trump embraces this, he could change the world. I'd even have a modicum of respect for him, if he could set the record straight.
The big news? Solar power has just crossed the threshold. It is now cheaper than coal. Beautiful, clean solar energy-- the hippies' dream-- is now affordable.
If you want a nine-minute overview of this amazing economic moment, check out The Indicator's "Why Cheap Solar Could Save the World." We did it exactly as Ha-Joon Chang describes-- with a combination of government subsidies that incentivized the technology and manipulated the market, leading to technological innovation. Not exactly the way Adam Smith envisioned. Things are a little more complicated than the conservative's wet dream of simplistic supply and demand/invisible hand capitalism.
But I digress. And that stuff is way to hard for Trump. All he needs to do is Tweet the news and apologize for his errors.
But even if Trump did that, it doesn't guarantee victory. We live in America. Even if Trump disappears, the folks who voted him in won't. Big energy has a lot of lobbying power. Trump and his followers have a brand attachment to coal which defies environmental logic (but makes perfect political sense). After coal, the next battle will be frakking. It could be the key to the election.
Conservatives struggle with the associations surrounding solar power. It's hippy dippy. But we are way past the days when Reagan removed the solar panels on the White House. If the Blackstone Group is investing heavily in solar power, then the hippies have won.
We need to pass the news to Trump (who certainly won't hear about this on FOX News). And the Dude needs to pass the news along to The Big Lebowski. The revolution isn't over. The revolution has just begun. The bums didn't lose.
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