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Comment by kibwen | Hacker News Reader

Necessary, but I'll believe it when I see it. As recently as 2016, the leading Republican presidental candidate was promising to bring back the coal industry.

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But was he able to actually achieve anything? Turns out the POTUS doesn't have the power to revitalize an industry bound for extinction due to much more powerful economical forces. Decarbonization is a big wheel already turning and cannot be stopped, never mind its direction reversed. All he could do was get himself elected, and honestly that's probably all he wanted.

Now he wants revenge.

He's likely even less concerned with actual political issues or doing anything to improve his voters' lifes, and much more concerned with single-mindedly trying to retaliate against anyone who he feels has slighted him personally.

Yes, but he counts environmentalists and the mythical “deep state” as reasons why he accomplished so little and I expect his revenge dreams include plenty of reversals, the harder to recover from the better. Last time, he ran it like one of his businesses but from the sounds of Project 2025 he’s more receptive to letting competent people do their thing while he’s going after his top enemies.

Didn't Germany open up more coal mines to cope with the shortage in natural gas from the Russian boycott and lack of electricity from shutting down their nuclear plants?

They did, though according to the yearly trends on https://app.electricitymaps.com/ the carbon intensity is back down to 2020 levels — and very similar to America.

Britain and Spain are impressive for the recent reductions in carbon emissions, and France for their long-term nuclear power use.

I'll just leave this here.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/oct/26/german-windfar...

No, mining is proceeding according to the plan to end in 2035. You might confuse it with the protests surrounding Lützerat, where the existing mining activities encroached (as planned) the village.

Germany kept 4 coal plants online in 2022 and 2023 that should have been shut down.

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