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CAN WE CONTINUE TALKING ABOUT “COAL COMPETITIVENESS”?



What is the difference between ignoring the Anthropocene as Trump does and allowing the price system to include the "social cost of carbon" related to coal and other hydrocarbons, and letting the "market forces" thereby determine its "competitiveness", but without prohibiting its use? Is it not that large quantities of coal, gas and oil should be left underground, so that their use will not lead us to exceed 2°C, not to mention the need to stop the exploration of new reservoirs and the use of new technologies to exploit unconventional deposits, such as shale gas and oil and the use of fracking?

I understand the anger caused by an elephant in a porcelain store, but I do not understand why Trump is presented as the great clumsy or intransigent enemy of the fight against climate change when they are the very mechanisms that are intended to be applied -like that of putting a "realistic" price on the CO2- to "slow down" global warming, which, just as Trump does, can do its job.

Nature has no longer such margins of flexibility that it is assumed, there is no longer room for experiments, trial and error, to continue disposing and putting on sale nature, its functions and services. The time for all this is over. Trump is just the intransigent way of exposing the immense brutality that we have been committing for centuries against our own bases of sustenance.

On the side that sees it, capitalism can continue, a little greener, since it is this immensely predatory system that is bringing us to the end of all our options of life.

