CNN commentator Fareed Zakaria said Sunday that President Donald Trump’s fight to help coal workers is a phony promise meant to win him support in crucial electoral states.
“The revival of coal is one more false promise and fake prediction from Trump that just isn’t going to happen,” Zakaria said Sunday morning on CNN’s Reliable Sources. Zakaria was referring to Trump’s campaign promises to strip away the environmental regulations and burdens the president believes are hurting coal country.
He suggested that Trump was “stuck on coal” because of the electoral political makeup of Republican-leaning states.
Zakaria referenced an NPR report conducted shortly after the 2016 presidential election showing many of the states that voted for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton were heavily invested in solar power jobs, while most of Trump’s states rebuked green energy.
Advents in natural gas production and solar wind production have made coal jobs an “endangered species,” Zakaria claimed. He also believes that the recent influx in green jobs all but guarantees Trump’s bid for coal is a losing one. One of the primary reasons solar power jobs are on the rise, analysts believe, is because of generous state subsidies.
Conservatives, infrastructure regulators, and analysts, meanwhile, argue that ramping up green energy subsidies propping up solar and wind power without the help of coal could leave the electrical grid dangerously compromised.
They point to evidence showing that Germany’s reliance on green energy subsidies have caused damage to their grids. The country’s subsidies for green energy, for instance, have sharply increased power prices, with the average German paying 39 cents per kilowatt-hour for electricity. The average U.S. citizen, meanwhile, spends 10.4 cents per kilowatt-hour by comparison.
Wind and solar power plants in the European country under-performed in January because of cloudy weather with little or no wind, which nearly collapsed the country’s entire grid. Germany’s power grid was strained to the absolute limit and could have gone offline entirely.
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