A NATIONAL SHAME: Washington selling out to coal BIG-TIME; spear-headed by Democrats in the house and coal industry $$$.

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Comment by Jeffrey Michael Paganini on September 30, 2009 at 8:59pm

Comment by WALTER REED on June 23, 2009 at 12:55pm

Yes, election pay back to the good ol' boys has been where all of our tax dollars have gone - poof. Same old game and the band play on. That said, our biggest problem is dependence on imported energy commodities from the middle east, who will keep squeezing the price of oil to hold at about $85/barrel. This first, must stop as our country's wealth continues to be exported. That all said, our most abundant and available resources of energy is coal and natural gas. New coal technologies are available for syn-gas and calcium carbide; both being considerably cleaner fuels than coal alone. Newer methods to sulfur on moving into place. I love wind, geothermal and solar, but at best, this is a slow moving expansion to account for the energies to be required by society. This progress must be insisted for accelerated progress. Uncontrolled population growth is a big factor as well as our government's total lack of any planning for our natural resources; even water and that's become a real problem. The carbon tax is a crock designed to benefit the good ol' boys once again at our direct expense. Pollution is no hoax, but CO2 as the problem, is; it's plant food. The bigger threat would be deep sea volcanoes and earthquakes that release deep sea strata of natural gas into the atmosphere. We need to fire congress, both D&R at the next election if ever we are ever to get their corrupted attention.

Perhaps the good news is that the sun has subsided of heavy sun-spots (NASA) for a while, which means our earth will likely cool some over the next 10 years and just perhaps, we will be at the early beginnings of a mini-ice age. But then, that is a bit more onerous for our future generations.

Comment by W. Dan Chance on June 23, 2009 at 12:30pm

Everyone without a job and a home should overwhelm Washington setting up camps on the mall and in every public park. Even if they put everyone in a cell, they would be better off with 3 squares a day and a roof over their head. Demand that solar energy be Priority # 1 before EVERYTHING else and that they get jobs to make that happen even if the job is carrying a bucket of bolts or sweeping a floor. Wages can be taxed but they help pay mortgages and groceries and gas bills. Demand that coal get the "hind tit", the "dregs" of what is "left over", the "table scraps". Just who the h... does the Union think will be paying for their short sighted gains. Their own members will...among others. Mandate that every one of the 50 states will institute statutes that will assure that all alternative systems will be allowed to sell their excess energy to the grid at the same price charged by the grid to the customer. Sanitation? Organize bucket brigades to take 5 gallon buckets to flush them in the public toilets of banks and sandwich stands all over town many protect the ones taking the crap to the toilet. How quick do you think the Congress will respond when they get calls from the CEO's and Board Chairmen of major banks? Hey sh.. happens. It time Congress got a whif.

Comment by Jim Martin on June 23, 2009 at 11:39am

I am not convinced CO2 sequestering is a useful strategy. The US has a lot of energy reserves in coal, but I can see no way around the greenhouse problem if we continue to use it at increasing levels. Reducing consumption through better insulation, smaller homes, lighter cars, etc. seems to be a reasonable step. what we need from DC is a tax structure that properly prices pollution.

Comment by Allen R. Gale on June 23, 2009 at 11:36am

This seems to be the same thing as all the other union-first deals that have gone down. It is PAYBACK - plain and simple. Why do we see all the American-designed and developed things being "licensed" offshore, especially to China who has shown a propesnity to export inferior and/or dangerous products to us, complaining about our "America First" statements in the Stimulus bill while issuing their own "China First" edict to their own people?

Why do we keep trying to come up with "new things" to solve our socio-econimic issues before taking on the fixing of the real causes of the problems? It has been suggested that Carbon FIber products which are made from oil might be made from coal instead. If that is possible, would that not be a better use for coal? Certainly there are better things to do with it than burn it to produce electricity.

Conservation simply results in higher prices of the commodity being "conserved" so that the net income of the producers stays the same. Certainly this is not without benefit, but don't the oil and power producers already make enough? They certainly were not eager to do the reciprocal of this when crude oil was rising so high last year. This Cap and Trade idea is even worse! That just raises the cost of everything without ANY benefit! Power producers would simply pay the "tax" and pass to cost on to us as they really don't have any alternative in the near term - and no one seems to want to talk about distributed generation, only more large, central plants and huge, new transmission grids.

Something has to change! We need to start doing the "right things", not the "expedient things", or the "payback things"!