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Cat: The motherfucking war on motherfucking coal is motherfucking OVER! Dog: What's the good part of coal mining? Is it the part where we destroy entire mountains? is it the poisoned watersheds? The acid rain? Poster: Coal 30% of the electricity 71% of the CO2 emissions Cat: We get...coal? Dog: At the cost of black lung? Mine collapse? COPD? Methane gas explosions? LayerContent: Hidden Costs of Coal 13,000 premature deaths 20,000 heart attacks $100 billion annually Cat: Don't coal miners deserve jobs? Dog: Might as well mail them a monthly check and a bottle of Percocet. It'd be cheaper and have a lower death toll. LayerContent: Pay all coal miners $75,000/year: $7.5 billion Federal subsidies for coal industry: Literally incalculable

NEW COMIC TUESDAYS AND FRIDAYS AND WHEN THE MOOD STRIKES

Motherfucking War on Coal. There should be a War on Coal. Trump's announced the end of the War on Coal, even though it never even started, since the Clean Power Plan has been stalled in litigation since before it was supposed to go into effect. This for an industry which is going bankrupt without the EPA messing around any further.

Not counting how dangerous the work of coal mining is, coal kills. The numbers are even worse in China where they don't have the EPA because they're so good at capitalism over there. Or something.

Coal mining isn't an enormous employment sector anyway, thanks to automation and declining demand; there are maybe 100,000 coal miners in the U.S. these days. We literally could pay them the salary of a mining engineer, rounded up to $75,000, for—do the math—$7.5 billion. That almost sounds like a lot of money until you try unraveling how much the feds spend on subsidies to this industry upon which we were supposedly warring; I tried like a sumbitch but I couldn't figure out a single number because it's massively obfuscatory bullshit but it's got to be at least $100 billion.

All of those practical things aside, look at mountiaintop removal mining and tell me it's not fucking awful. Coal mining assholes call the mountains, trees, and soil overburden. I'm not much of a treehugger but FUCK. Note Trump and W. Bush and all those other assholes don't put their Mar-A-Lagos and Prairie Chapel Ranches anywhere near Filled-in-Holler, W.Va. Pour yourself a nice big glass of Trump-colored branch water, why don't you?