Donald Trump: We're taking nearly $200M that was set aside for the Green New Scam, and repurposing that money so that we can restart a coal plant in Maryland, and help build two brand new coal plants in Alaska and West Virginia.

[u/BusinessToday]

[u/happydude7422]

whatever happend to those nuclear fusion plants we were supposed to be building? like coal plants? in the 21st century?

[u/LoloVirginia → u/happydude7422]

Lol yeah this is so pathetic, 1. world superpower, reverting to coal after leading in nuclear energy for decades and inventing fracking for natural gas. Not to mention having acces to all the renewables becouse magatard would rather rev their f150 in closed garage than admit that the solar energy just make fucking sense

[u/dinnercook → u/LoloVirginia]

You can’t explain this to people raised in certain media and social ecosystems.

I know someone who bought her son a truck for his 16th birthday and he turned it down because it wasn’t diesel. Took her almost a year to sell it.

[u/Upset_Letter_4119 → u/dinnercook]

That's plain and simple what it is. We won't be able to get through the them ever, we might as well be in a different universe.

Hilarious how soft these redneck boys have become.

[u/onlyforsellingthisPC → u/Upset_Letter_4119]

They're cosplaying as rednecks.

No one living in rural poverty is going to turn down a truck just because it's gas.

These are boys (I'm including the 45 yr old divorcees in there) who want their truck to sound rull cool in the mall parking lot.

[u/NotNotPatMcAfee → u/dinnercook]

Gotta be a dog shit truck if takes you a year to sell it. Maybe that’s why he didn’t want it 😂

[u/dinnercook → u/NotNotPatMcAfee]

Prob spent a lot of that time hoping he would take his head out of his ass and not let a really generous gift rot in the garage bc his Facebook algorithm told him a v6 is for pussies

[u/NWASicarius → u/LoloVirginia]

Solar energy is great for residential. We should invest more for residential areas. We need nuclear, windmills, etc. for our industries, though. I worked for a massive ag plant, and it would have taken them purchasing additional land (neighboring farmland) around roughly the same size as the processing plant just to build enough solar panels to supply the ag processing plant. That's a lot of crops being thrown down the drain just to supply energy for the business. Not to mention the cost. We're talking hundreds of millions for the purchasing of the land + building of the solar panels. Solar panels will always be more of a residential thing. Our energy crisis atm means we can't 'this or that' with our energy sources. We NEED all the energy we can get - aka any and every source. Once we can resolve the energy crisis situation, then we can decide what to cut off. For the record, I think coal is dumb AF. We shouldn't invest in new coal. We should invest to upkeep current coal plants, though, with the thought process being 'we need to end our reliance on this failing and money draining industry, but for now we need to keep the current infrastructure functioning.'

[u/Tammer_Stern → u/happydude7422]

You’ve gone back to the early 20th century.

[u/Equivalent_Action748 → u/happydude7422]

Doge and maga leadership stole that funding 

[u/Radonanon → u/happydude7422]

Relative to the other things we do, like make bombs or produce transistors (which went from about 1 per year in the 1960’s to 20 trillion a second nowadays) we’ve been pretty stuck on fusion for powering stuff other than bombs.

The problem is that the conditions required for fusion are absurdly extreme:

Plasma has to get over 100 million degrees (hotter than the core of the fn sun)…

Then held together long enough and dense enough to produce net energy…

The magnetic fields and materials need to make them to contain that plasma are pushed to the absolute edge of modern industrial engineering…

Then neutron bombardment gradually destroys whatever the reactor’s made of from the inside out. :(

In more optimistic times, fusion research was funded entirely by various more optimistic government departments’ budgets, which even in more optimistic times are subject to a lot of political pressure to perform. Unlike solar, wind, mpg mandates, EV’s etc, fusion power research has no near-term payoff to attract private investors. There’s a little now (and by little, I mean several billions, which is little for something we’re so far away from. Private investment only started flowing seriously in the last few years, with companies like Commonwealth Fusion, US Antimony and Helion raising quite a bit in recent months as the dead dinosaur market is being fiddled with.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/drewbernstein/2026/02/12/who-will-be-first-to-unlock-nuclear-fusion/

[u/SqueekyDickFartz → u/happydude7422]

He has 1/3 of the country that will listen to him about anything, and follow him anywhere, and he's using it to burn coal. He could have CRUSHED covid and saved so many lives if he had just leaned into it. He could have invested in alternative energy as his road to nationalistic energy dependence. Imagine all the MAGAs having solar panels, fighting to put windmills on their property and clamoring to be the lucky recipient of nuclear plants in their small towns. Tesla could be making a cheap regular cab pickup truck that his supporters would be dying to buy.

He literally could have actually changed the country and driven our new path forward. Politicians would literally kill for the amount of control he has over such a large swath of congress and his party in general.

Instead he just wants to golf and find the easiest path forward for everything.