The week is starting off with bad news from the Ukraine, where an explosion Sunday afternoon killed eight miners and injured five, according to press agency reports.
There was lots of other coal-related news and commentary over the weekend.
Closer to home, we published a follow-up story in Saturday’s Gazette-Mail to my Friday afternoon Coal Tattoo piece about a WVDEP biologist alleging agency Secretary Randy Huffman misled Congress about the damage being done by mountaintop removal coal mining in West Virginia.
Sunday’s Gazette-Mail featured a front-page story by my buddy Bill Lynch about the coal industry’s Labor Day speaker — climate change denier Lord Christopher Walter Monckton. Bill tried to make it clear, I thought, that Monckton’s views are way out of line with the “findings of the majority of the scientific community.” I’ll be blogging more later this week and next about Lord Monckton. For now, let me ask this: Isn’t the coal industry talking out of both sides of its mouth yet again — on the one hand, they lobby Congress to add more “clean coal” money to research ways to capture carbon dioxide emissions, while on the other hand inviting speakers to come in and convince coalfield residents global warming isn’t real. Will the real coal industry please stand up?
Along those same lines, take note that the founder of the Web site JunkScience.com, Steven J. Milloy, will be a headline speaker at the West Virginia Chamber of Commerce’s annual Business Summit Sept. 2-4 at The Greenbrier.
The print edition of the Sunday Gazette-Mail also included an op-ed in which Boone County, W.Va., economic development authority director Larry Lodato touted the “wage and tax benefits” of the coal industry. The piece doesn’t appear to be available on our Web site (maybe it will be added later today). It was headlined , “Mayflies or jobs?” — a reference to one sentence in the next-to-last paragraph of the piece: “What it all boils down to is mayflies or jobs.” Lodato offered no explanation or back-up data for this argument. And, as readers of Coal Tattoo know, this is just a coal industry effort to cook up a false trade-off that ignores the massive environmental impacts from mountaintop removal.
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“Will the real coal industry please stand up?”
It seems perfectly reasonable for the industry to support CCS (required to reduce CO2 if regs require) and to question anthropogenic warming (that would cause regs that kill coal w/o and maybe w/ CCS). Reasonable people don’t put all their eggs in one basket.
It is not any different than enviros blasting surface mining because of “stream “destroying valley fills but supporting deep mining which requires valley fills for portal construction and refuse disposal.
The coal industry certainly pays attention to the growing number of scientists that question anthropogenic warming as do political leaders that understand the need for baseload electrical fuels.
Ken, you should check out the uproar in Kentucky when our Rep. Jim Gooch brought Lord Monckton here to speak last year for a Frankfort hearing on global warming. It was a disastrous event for the global-warming deniers and brought some ridicule upon Rep. Gooch, especially his subsequent appearance on “Good Morning America.”
If anyone’s interested, Lord Christopher Monckton is the 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, and Im sure he and Ted Nugent will get along just swell.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Monckton,_3rd_Viscount_Monckton_of_Brenchley
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