Back in the '90s, the big deal in the Green world was "clean coal" stuff that had very low non-fuel elements included in it. There were 2 sources of this in the whole world: Northern California, and Indonesia. The Riady family in Indonesia had a sweet deal selling their coal to California which had mandated the stuff for all their coal plants, their inability to produce enough of it notwithstanding. Prospectors, however, discovered a huge deposit of the stuff in southern Utah that promised to make the U.S. independent of Indonesian coal. The Riadys countered this by donating heavily to the Clinton campaign, and when Slick Willie got elected, he declared the area in Utah with the coal to be the Grand Escalade National Monument. All mining was forbidden, including some that had been going on for some time, and the Riadys kept their income stream. So did the Clintons.
Fast forward to today: Coal in any form is now the (pardon the expression) "bete noir" of the Greenies, and Nuclear power is now looking like a workable answer, but only to people who know what they're talking about. The Biden administration is taking a page from the Clintons, and looking to declare the U.S. biggest uranium deposits to be a National Monument. In Arizona. Stinking Desert National Monument maybe? Not to worry, Uranium can be purchased from close friends like the Russians and maybe some African states.
