I know a good deal of Republicans want the government to take an active role in protecting the coal industry, but another large number of conservatives, myself included, simply don't want government actively trying to kill the industry and making it harder for coal to compete. I understand that the industry is largely declining due to cheaper natural gas and other competing energy sources, and that's fine, but we shouldn't have the government stepping in trying to hasten the process of that decline. That was my problem during the Obama years; not that we should be engaging in protectionism. If coal is dying, let it die on its own.
Governments around the world (not just in the US) need to
actively discourage the burning of fossil fuels. We need to all move towards cleaner methods of producing electricity. We are already very late in the game in helping to mitigate the damage we have already done. The amount of carbon-dioxide is slowly killing the ability for all living things, animals and plants, to thrive (and for some, to just exist) in this world.
I would like to recommend a PBS special that was released just recently in coordination with Earth Day. It was a 2-hour documentary show called
Decoding the Weather Machine. If you have not seen it, you can watch it free via the internet ... here is the PBS link :
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/earth/decoding-weather-machine.html
