I would encourage anyone who holds an opposing view on anything...

I would encourage anyone who holds an opposing view on anything that is written here to elaborate. We seem to have some climate activists here who worship nuclear reactors rather than solar panels. They are all one of the same, anyone who does not agree with their beliefs is labelled a fascist, communist, capitalist pig or some other derogatory term, all while swearing and vehemency is intertwined with their outburst to give their opinions some sort of emotional 'weight' even though they have no rational, based counter argument to give their views real merit.

The preconception that coal is a dying industry and that something new will replace it still lives. There is a perverse human characteristic that thinks something new is always better. Coal cannot be stamped out as long as human desire for a better life is part of our nature. On top of that, greed and the want for excess will drive coal consumption higher. We seem to all be under the impression that fossil fuel consumption has increased because of the rapid increase of the global population, but, in reality the rapid increase of the global population is the result of the rapid increase in fossil fuel consumption. Something cannot be created out of nothing, the evidence for this is everywhere.

No fancy technology or alternate source of energy can commercially compensate for what coal, gas and oil provides. For example, nuclear has been around for 100 years and still provides a small fraction of overall global energy needs (heating, transportation and manufacturing process' included). If it were truly beneficial over what fossil fuels provide it would have become the dominant source of power. Japan is turning away from nuclear and towards coal for a good reason, those Japanese are smart, smarter than me. But I suppose people want to repeat the mistakes of others rather than learning from their mistakes. Maybe Japan had never heard of the Chernobyl disaster before they began their nuclear program, or maybe they thought they could do better than the Russians, maybe they thought they were smarter, or their technology was better. Arrogance with a sprinkling of ignorance makes any idea a good idea.