Then again, you have the "unwritten" rules. Like when Elizabeth Warren said she was an Indian and all is fine and dandy.
Coal is horrid. We went with coal because environmentalists would not stand for nuclear energy. Nuclear Energy is very dangerous the way it wound up being done so in that regard coal seems a good choice. The odd thing that nobody told us is that more nuclear pollution is dragged up with the coal and spewed into the atmo than we've gotten from nuclear plants. It's distributed more evenly so you don't associate a lot of deaths with it.. Coal dredges up mercury, spews it into the air and is the reason our fish are inedible. So if Obama kills coal, and nuclear [which could be done safely but never was, not sure how that came about] remains suppressed and energy prices are high enough to make solar attractive then a new age will be ushered in. That is one thing I like about Obama, he is willing to do what it takes to kill off coal. If he's the Tool for that job then fine, use him for that. Ethanol is stupid, I cannot believe that we sacrifice good soil to generate fuel for cars. Bush II was real big on that. In recent decades we found enough natural gas to fuel everything from our cars to our outhouse heaters if any remain. If we go with that while solar power is coming online we will be in great shape. I love: --3D printing [a little off topic but a boon to the environment in many ways] --Solar power --Natural Gas --Tesla S1 [a little off topic but what a great car] Revelation 11:18 tells about the destruction of the "destroyers [corruptors] of the earth". I'd like it if we could sidestep this pollution thingy that destroys and corrupts the earth. It's entirely unnecessary.
There are ways to use coal cleanly such as gassification and chemical looping. It would have made more sense to dump the money into that instead of Solendra, etc. Until a new process is discovered to recover more of the energy without the big problem of cell degredation, solar is no where near ready for prime time. It's mostly flushing money down the toilet at this point.
"made more sense?" we're talking about a fascist state where business owns politicians. The better solar is the Stirling Engine variety. That technology is up and running and capable of providing all the US's energy.