Here, in Key West, the Navy has a station with a huge desalination plant. After hurricanes when water gets cut or contaminated, the plant produces enough water to su stain the key (island) and lower keys. It’s slow, cumbersome, and very expensive. That is not a good option

Saudi Arabia gets almost all their water from desalination. It is about twice the price of conventional fresh water, but it still leaves some salt in it. It's drinkable, but if you use it for irrigation, it will slowly salinate the soil, until nothing grows there anymore.

Well maybe Covid did some good for the climate, because people saw that when we all pollute a lot less, you can actually see the sky, or the scenery a mile away. Other than that Covid was very expensive and did harm to the economy. We can best save the planet from climate change, when there are no other crisis to worry about and there is money to invest in new technology.

There are too many people in the world to have it sustain us all, but death and destruction never solves high population growth. All data shows prosperity slows population growth the most. The one challenge is to have prosperity, without destroying our (natural) resources. That's just a choice. We can choose to let people take maximum prosperity for themselves and destroying our (natural) resources,
so we will all suffer decline and despair later OR we can choose to share prosperity, not let some people exploit our (natural) resources and use the resulting progress
to prevent decline and despair.

That decline and despair is not just relevant to our grandchildren, it has already been going on for a while. Your chance of being severely affected is just still small right now. If you'd live in a poor area, around the equator, you would know. But rich countries are also starting to suffer the effects. Increasing numbers of people die in wildfires, floods, hurricanes, exceptional cold spells or from heat exhaustion. If you'd pay attention,
you would realize that you cannot avoid this for many decades. It's already causing discomfort, it will cause suffering very soon, it might kill you at any time and the probability of that is steadily increasing.

You are right. I forgot. We went diving at John Pennekamp in April and there’s so many patches dying it makes you want to cry. And don’t forget the flesh eating buggies found in lakes in the Carolina’s from the heat.
That’s why I don’t understand. You don’t even have to be technical to see what the change in mean temperature does to the environment. If you know the outdoors, you know it.

Is your way of life not more important than what powers your car? That pickup truck will run just as good on ethanol, biogas or biodiesel (if it's a diesel).
If I was your president, I would pay you to get your car converted. It would cost a lot of investment money to build the ethanol, biogas and biodiesel factories and the solar- wind- and geothermal-plants to power them, but that money will come back mostly in taxes, because of the economic growth it will bring. We would need those ex-coalminers too, because converting your economy to green energy takes a lot of manpower. We don't need half the people for that, we might need 100 times more people.

Maybe some of them won't be smart enough to be operators in the bio-fuel factory, but I'm sure we can teach them to install solar panels, drive trucks with biowaste, drill pipes for geothermal energy, lubricate windturbines or some other jobs that takes less than years of training.
Do you think coalminers are that stupid? The few that are useless can stay at home.

You keep talking about money, but have you any idea how much climate disasters cost? Much, much, much more than all the solar flairs ,volcanic eruptions, tsunami's and etc. How about agriculture becoming impossible in most of your country?
Climate change will be more expensive than anything, until we are all dead.

Phart, Sure you can continue with coal. But, can you assure us that that money will go for cancer research and cure or to rebuild our infrastructure? Or will that extra money be profits for the stock holders?
Another thing. Why does the rest of the country or the worl even, pay for the actions of people that go to work for the coal companies instead of getting a better, more useful education? Why should we worry about 50% of the miners workforce while thousands, yes, thousand's of people die every year from lung decease? I rather pay them full Social Security.--------------------------------------- added after 7 minutesNatural disaster happen all the time and have done so since the dawn of time. That is an extra we have to take care. I know you know Haity has suffered 2 major earthquakes and several hurricanes in the last 20 yrs. Those people don't have coal, but, they are so poor, the make their own charcoal. have you ever burned charcoal indoor? try it sometime. No, better not. The change of the type of work may be a trade off, but, a worker that works on win energy, can also work as a car mechanic or medical equipment tech or even teach. You know what coal workers can do when their coal work is over? Shoot their foot off and claim disability. Don't you ever look at the long term?

Phart
Not fuck with what is working? IT’S NOT WORKING.