Yeah. My ancestors mined coal in NE Pa. Obama wants you to spend $50k for solar panels and a windmill on your roof. We've got enough coal to power everything we want for the next 800 years. Take it up with the America hating shitbirds in the Sierra Club.


http://blog.nj.com/njv_paul_mulshine...as_no_cre.html

 

Here's what you need to understand;

Coal is mined by working class white people who believe in
God and own guns. If there is one thing Obama, Saul Alinsky Democrats and the Sierra Club hate, it's working class white folks who worship God and own guns.

 

I couldn't possibly resist throwing down on this thread.

Nuclear is cool except for all the horrible problems with it. Hideously expensive, has its own finite supply of fuel, nowhere to put the waste, no one wants it anywhere near them, security issues, the list goes on and on. Nuclear cannot be anything more than a band-aid, unless and until cold fusion is perfected. Renewables at their current level of technology are also just a band-aid. But if we're going to spend money on energy, it may as well be energy that is basically limitless - sun, wind, waves, all that stuff. Yes, it will take a lot of money to develop renewables. You get more for your money though - not just energy, but the peace of mind knowing your kids won't have to march off to war to secure more fossil fuels for the empire.

Coal: there is no clean coal... right now. If you sequestered the emissions, it'd be plenty clean. The thing is that we don't have any coal power plants that do this right now. We don't know how to do carbon sequestration on a large scale. The chinese are actually doing a lot of work on this right now, and they are coming up with some pretty good systems for keeping a lid on the emissions. But like battery tech, it's just not quite there yet.

The other thing about coal is that at current rates of use, we have decades of it. But if we start running millions of vehicles off of electricity generated from coal, then the current rates of use no longer apply. Sooner rather than later we hit peak coal, and like someone else said already - welcome back to square one.

Energy solutions that boil down to "let's use that stuff up until it's gone" don't appeal to me. Animals that use up all the resources in their environment tend to go extinct. Animals that achieve some semblance of balance with their environment tend to hang around for millions of years. There's a lesson in that. Just because we're humans and we're clever and have cool stuff doesn't mean we are exempt from the laws of nature. If you disagree, then I invite you to read the histories of the Mayans, the Easter Islanders, the Greenland Norse, and so on. Humans that don't find a way to live in balance with their surroundings die. Every time.

That being said, I don't really have any answers. I still ride my little fossil fueled hawk whenever I can. I don't really know how to fix this energy thing. I just know that long term, fossil fuels aren't the answer.

 

Yeah, coal is dirty. Ask 1.4 billion Chinamen and 1.2 billion Indians if they care.


They refuse to exempt themselves from the law of survival like 306 million Americans think they can. It would be about 210 million Americans, but that's before we opened the border to become the safety valve for the third world's rabbit hatch.

So lets cash our unemployment checks before they turn into IOUs and head over to Walmart. I need a new pair of petroleum based Chinese plastic shoes.