They signed the Paris agreement -- then bought our coal...hypocrisy is the Left's touchstone

They signed the Paris agreement -- then bought our coal

Remember Larry Groce's song "Junk Food Junkie"?

Yeah, in the daytime I'm Mister Natural
Just as healthy as I can be
But at night I'm a junk food junkie
Good lord have pity on me

So it goes with Europe.

In the daytime, they're Mister Climate Change -- just as renewable energy as can be.

But at night they await shipment of their coal from overseas.

U.S. exports of coal rose 60%, Reuters reported.

From Reuters:

The previously unpublished figures provided to Reuters by the U.S. Energy Information Administration showed exports of the fuel from January through May totaled 36.79 million tons, up 60.3 percent from 22.94 million tons in the same period in 2016. While reflecting a bounce from 2016, the shipments remained well-below volumes recorded in equivalent periods the previous five years.

They included a surge to several European countries during the 2017 period, including a 175 percent increase in shipments to the United Kingdom, and a doubling to France - which had suffered a series of nuclear power plant outages that required it and regional neighbors to rely more heavily on coal.

"If Europe wants to lecture Trump on climate then EU member states need transition plans to phase out polluting coal," said Laurence Watson, a data scientist working on coal at independent think tank Carbon Tracker Initiative in London

Don't worry, Europe. We'll keep secret your need for coal as a backup to all that wind and solar energy you pretend are all you need.

Don't forget, West Virginia coal is the best. Doesn't pollute like that brown coal the Germans and the Poles have.

Both the coal industry and the Trump administration said the rising exports of both steam coal, used to generate electricity, and metallurgical coal, used in heavy industry, were evidence that Trump's agenda was having a positive impact.

"Simply to know that coal no longer has to fight the government -- that has to have some effect on investment decisions and in the outlook by companies, producers and utilities that use coal," said Luke Popovich, a spokesman for the National Mining Association.

Shaylyn Hynes, a spokeswoman at the U.S. Energy Department, said: "These numbers clearly show that the Trump Administration's policies are helping to revive an industry that was the target of costly and job killing over-regulation from Washington for far too long."

But hey, my moral and intellectual superiors tell me coal is dead.