The fake debates and 2 year presidential campaign brought to you by CNN and their advertising partner "Clean Coal".

Here we go again. You would think that the powers that be in Washington would have the best and the brightest advisers with the most current scientific information at their collective fingertips..
Wouldn't you?

As the author stated, there is no such thing as "Clean Coal".
It's an oxymoron and a grand misnomer..
What kind of idiot thinks it is Ok to continue raping the landscape by ripping the top off a mountain to mine coal?
Coal mining is destructive and toxic,
Burning coal is toxic.
Coal ash is toxic.
Why blow a billion on an experiment that even the coal industry has little invested into the R&D so they can continue to plunder, pollute and profit?

We are on the wrong path, spend a billion on solar and hemp.
We NEED a clean renewable and sustainable plan.
What we don't need is more of the same toxic corporate bullshit.. IE coal & nuclear..

imo
http://opinionsandreasons.blogspot.com/

Sioux Rose

ELEMENTAL: All good points. So long as money/capital/Mammon set the agenda, aided and abeted by Mars rules, nothing sane will get done! The concept of WORTH has been transfered to money, which is only a symbolic equivalent; and now that our money supply has been infused with megadoses of freshly printed greenbacks, how can Mother Nature keep up with casino capitalism? She's already showing paroxysms of overkill... and still those in a position to alter the agenda just press onward at full speed ahead towards the ecological/moral abyss.

And here we are in the 21st century still relying on 19th/early20th century technology when we have better ideas that get shot down. I know coal and nuclear will be in greater demand but only because other better ideas that would reduce or even eliminate those two have been shot down countless times. Peak Coal will probably come sooner than even I imagined now that I realize the serious limitation of coal.

I noted the commentary in the second video as to how "Longwall Mining" increased profits and PRODUCTIVITY.

Productivity is becoming like a holy mantra in political discourse. Our major Political parties here in Canada, and our business newspapers continualy argue that Canada is losing the "Productivity war" to the USA and unless we change various policies we will be unable to compete on an equal footing.

I have long argued this a phony arguement because productivity increases are usually always at the EXPENSE of something else, like the enviroment or the worker.

It is not free.

Do people still bother to say, "even if we can't trust the Democrats on foreign policy, at least we can trust them on the environment..."?

AMERICA

“My country tis of thee”; what does this mean, is it just for the elites of the country and not for “we the people? For that seems to be the case of the haves and have-nots.
“Sweet land of liberty”; Can we say this with our head held high? Nay! For if there is no law for all and money is justice and for a law that obscenely is called patriot act that harbors and hides what the elites would rather not have ought but themselves see?
“Of thee I sing”; the song has turned to a lament and there has not been for a time a reason or a cause that this sorrow would turn to a gladness that would light the heavens.
“Land where my fathers died”; this could be at any point in our history; yet it would be hard to be straightforward and claim that it has been a truly heroic past, present and maybe into the future.
“Land of the pilgrims pride”; Where is there any pride in the genocide of a host that kept them alive only to be systematically and with intent to eliminate? Pride entered and the fall cometh. Today, tomorrow? We know not the time; the cause happened and the effect will be.
“From every mountain side, let freedom ring”; It would be a difficult task to let anything ring on the side of every mountainside excepting if it were connected in someway to a giant machines spurred on by insatiable greed with no thought to human health or wellbeing as the mountain is reduced to a molehill. The money is removed to a location where the mountain is not the view. The ones left behind at the mountain, do they hear the mountainside ring of freedom? We have left our freedoms at the cesspool of DC with the bankers and politicians. What the lyrics say grabbed my heart and soul when young and read the accepted words in histories, already the dumbing down of the schools was in progress and the future almost predictable. This is my revolt at being so gullible.
Tony 6/13/09

Vote third party.

As I have posted at CD in the past couple of years, governments in the U.S. have been jerking us around with subsidies for "clean coal" for decades. Back in the early 1980s, for example, then-Ohio Governor Dick Celeste, a newly-elected supposedly-liberal Democrat (defeating the infamous 4-dead-in Ohio Jimmy Rhodes), pushed through the Ohio Legislature a $100-million bond issue for research and possible construction of fluidized bed coal technology: allegedly "clean coal." That was back when a hundred million dollars counted for something!

That hundred million dollars disappeared down a rat hole (or a "spider hole" as the case may be...). Totally crooked, and no major news organization bothered to investigate where the 100 million went.

When I was a kid in junior high growing up in a suburb outside Chicago, my family had a farmhouse heated by a coal furnace in the basement, that used an iron screw to grind up and feed coal into a thermostat-controlled furnace (the thermostat used a mercury switch). The coal burning process produced rather large hard masses of waste that we called "clunkers." I cannot recall if we were burning "hard coal" (anthracite) or soft, more polluting, coal. One of my jobs was to fill the coal bay; another was to remove the clunkers to the back yard, where they piled up. And up. To this day I wonder if clunkers have any value, and what all those coal-fired power plants do with them. Landfilled? What is in them?

After the wood ran out, America started heating with coal, and making steel with coal, for at last a century, polluting the land in an eastern direction because that is the way the wind blows. Among the pollutants of coal-fired plants is airborne mercury, a neurotoxin. Part of my point here is that CO2 production by coal-fired power plants may be near the least of our survival issues. Meanwhile, my impression is that the Dubya administration slashed budgets for such as EPA research into environmental pollution including that of coal while actually promoting mountaintop removal. If I had my druthers, the entire population of West Virginia would descend on Washington DC and storm that fucking government and plant the state flag.

If you want to call me a HILLBILLY, more power to you! I am really sick of stereotypes. We are being made poor, and ill, by a complex model of daily interpersonal communication that for decades has depended on a fictional rewriting of history.

As Henry Adams wrote a century ago, if it could be proven that History could be made "scientific," academia would deny it. Academia now avoids Henry Adams, son and grandson of two presidents, because he secretly embraced the Empericism of Karl Marx, and we just can't have that here at the home of the brave and the land of the free, except that the brave are now cowards and the land if gone or poisoned.

Grab your inhaler. Suck.

-30-

Why don't polluters pay for their own pollution? If Peabody is making so much money why can't they--and the rest of King Coal--pay for their own "clean coal" R&D? I think they know it's futile, too, but if Uncle Sam is willing to foot the bill... Just one coal-burning power plant produces thousands of tons of CO2 daily. Where do you put it all and how do you keep it there. What a waste of time and money that should be going to renewable energy development. This is another in a growing list of my disappointments with the new administration.

http://freesolaradvice.blogspot.com