1750 Coal Down Cycle

One of the big issues about curtailing global warming has been that it would be impossible to cut back on the use of coal in the US.
Countless dire predictions about what would happen if the government imposed a carbon tax were put forth. Businesses would be unprofitable. Some would close. Coal-related mines, industries, and employment would collapse, and so on, and so on. The prospect of a warming planet and all its future negative economic effects was ignored because of all the economic effects not ignoring it would cause today.
So congress told the president to lay off.
Meanwhile, other businesses starting fracking. Fracking's a process that's brought up huge reserves of natural gas. Of course there's environmental consequences there too. Pumping water at high pressure into underground formations is not without its effects, among them polluted water and poisonously flooded lands. There's even some science to support the notion that a spate of earthquakes in the central US, where no apparent fault lines exist, was caused by fracking as well.
Forget coal mine collapses, we can now cause earthquakes.
Ain't technology wonderful?
In any event, what government failed to do, business is now doing for them. A recent article in Bloomberg Business Week reported that cheap and abundant natural gas has reduced the share of coal used in electrical power generation to 40%, down from 57%. Coal stocks are down and mines are closing.
Oh yeah, you don't need miners for fracking.
So there's cleaner air and dirtier water, less fear of coastal flooding and more earthquakes in the interior. And what the government couldn't do to destroy the coal business the gas business did instead.
Just one question: Does this mean I can set the thermostat lower on my air conditioner this summer?
America, ya gotta love it.