"And ironically, the voters in Appalachia being courted are bearing the brunt of it"
By "bearing the brunt" you mean "having jobs"? Have you asked them whether they would rather have jobs or not?
Also, they know perfectly well that closing their coal mines doesn't mean that coal doesn't get mined and burned. It just gets mined and burned in other countries where environmental regulations are non-existent.
The simplistic "coal is bad" thesis has a) put a huge number of Americans out of work and b) made the global environment worse.
I am confused by this argument as it seems to be orthogonal to the point the GP was making, namely that coal does have a large impact on the global environment. Stating that China uses a lot of coal isn't exactly helping your case, considering that coal causes more air pollution deaths in China than any other source[1].
China also has huge investments in solar and some of the worst pollution anywhere. They've hit peak coal and are apparently starting in the other direction [1].
According to Wikipedia, eletriciy generation from coal is at 73%. And it is questionable if they are at peak coal. If their electricity generation doubles and they reduce the percentage to 60%, they're going to be burning a lot of coal.
I'm not an expert in this issue or doing any analysis, and neither are you. I shared a link I thought was interesting. I'm sure there is better analysis out there if someone cares to look, but I'm not going to do that right now.
China is indeed 'greening' its economy to move to what it calls a Ecological Civilisation. This is a big development, and it goes lumpy but its government bodies coordination is improving. An example of which is the development of a Green Financial Systems (see this PBoC's link: http://www.pbc.gov.cn/english/130721/3131759/index.html)
How would this have changed if we were mining our own coal? If they're using an amount that far outstrips everyone else combined, the environmental damage would be largely the same with or without US coal.
1) A substantial portion of the Chinese coal is burned to produce steel and other products that are exported to the United States.
2) Burning that coal here (where there are environmental regulations) would produce less damage that burning it in China (where there are effectively none).
I'm not sure why this is confusing.
I'm also not sure why people are modding down factual posts. That type of behavior is exactly what's given you President Trump.
China exports 800 million tons of steel and the US only imports 1.9% of that. Burning coal here will have very little impact on China steel operations.
We don't have to choose. Today's technology means that burning coal is clean. There are carbon dioxide emissions, but in terms of pollutants that make the air dirty, there is very little (carbon dioxide emission have climate impacts, but are not toxic or dirty).
There is NOT actually a clean coal plant that is operational in the US. I would not talk about this as how our coal plants currently operate. Attempts at putting a clean coal plant online have faced complications. Perhaps this why Clean Coal is called a myth?
By "bearing the brunt" you mean "having jobs"? Have you asked them whether they would rather have jobs or not?
Also, they know perfectly well that closing their coal mines doesn't mean that coal doesn't get mined and burned. It just gets mined and burned in other countries where environmental regulations are non-existent.
The simplistic "coal is bad" thesis has a) put a huge number of Americans out of work and b) made the global environment worse.