Coal Is The New Cool

Tell Them
Willie Boy 
Is Here

In between bouts of watching baseball and sneering at the politicians, the voters, and pretty much the world and everyone and everything in it, I do a bit of research in order to back up my writing.

Coal is good and it is always good.  I can prove this because once upon a time we did not have coal.  Fortunately some people understood that burning coal could prevent deforestation.    Although we pretty much have ended up chopping down the forests anyway, but instead of coal we now have oil and we're almost out of that but we still have plutonium.  I am certain that there is no downside to that one.   At any rate, China wants coal including America's coal.

Can something really be exported if it supposedly affects the entire planet? I'm going to dodge this question, because otherwise I would actually have to look at things known as "facts" which might contradict my cosy world-view: The one in which I rich deserve all of the good things in my life and which in turn allows to despise anyone or anything which could conceivably cause me the slightest inconvenience.  Also, I would be implicated in the 100-year struggle of the business elite against any kind of constraint on the waste products they spew and which harm no one.  Sometimes I like to inhale from a bag of soot and prance about like a chimney sweep--it's fun!

But I digress.  The point is this: China wants stuff.  Who are we to deny them that stuff?  If people want to buy stuff and they have the money to buy stuff, that's a good thing.  Remember, there are no limits--wealth is infinite and our capacity to clean up our own waste is infinite and our ability grow food is infinite.  (Until April 15th comes around, then it's time to bitch and whine about how finitude of my income.)

And as my history lesson above demonstrates,  the faster China burns through this coal, the happier and richer and better off we all will be, and we shall never ever never have to worry about the consequences.  In sum: Burn baby burn.

George F. Will