Re: Coal stocks fell today
The real tragedy of what Trump is doing is that he's not just trying to cause an environmental catastrophe, but that he's also, apparently intentionally, trying to ensure the US ends up as some backwater. On the one hand developed countries were pretty good at mining coal and making steel in bulk more than a hundred years ago. Both of these are just solved problems that involve a lot of more-or-less deeply unpleasant and more-or-less dangerous manual labour. On the other hand we have people like Musk who are trying to solve hard problems like getting people into space cheaply and making better batteries. Just think about the battery thing: whoever makes a battery which is really practical for electric cars is basically going to rule the world: not because electric cars are more environmentally-friendly but because they are *better*: better acceleration, less wear, better: all they need is good batteries. There is *so much money* sitting in that technology when it works.
But no, coal was good enough for the Victorians and it's good enough for us: let's leave the Chines or the Europeans to invent a really good battery while we slowly fade from relevance.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
