My letter to the NY Times re: Coal to the Rescue, but Mr. Sommer Doesn't Like It

 Re: Coal Stocks Rise, Even as the Planet Warms by Jeff Sommer

Dear Sirs:

Even Jeff Sommer's highly politicized report cannot hide the fact that the Green Energy Movement has failed and that coal--Yes! Coal!--has come to the rescue. Coal-fired electricity generation in the US has expanded by twenty-one percent over 2020, due to the failure of "significant global investment in green energy". 

Mr. Sommer is more worried about the long-term future of the planet than whether people alive right now will be able to afford heat this winter. Mr. Sommers would have us believe that burning more coal in order to stay warm and keep the lights on will cause "impaired health, catastrophic floods and heat waves, species extinction, and on and on". Really?  Even the government's own NOAA scientists predict that the planet will warm by only one-third of one-degree Fahrenheit per decade in the next fifty years. Oh, my...

Mr. Sommer places his hopes on this week's UN's climate conference in Glasgow to set new targets that will halt coal's rescue of an artificially fuel-starved planet. Even if they do, how could anyone believe that this is anything more than posturing? The conference's biggest cheerleader, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, doesn't even know how to get his country's lorry drivers back in their cabs.

All the so-called "investment" in green energy has proven one thing, though: that reality is not optional. Coal works; green energy doesn't.