Cheers.

Since the Powder River coal in Montana is plentiful and cheap, let’s look at it. We can’t jump off coal overnight. The inhuman mountaintop exploding, village destroying West Virginia coal is the cleanest for electricity generation, but the Montana coal isn’t that much dirtier and it’s six times cheaper. Because getting out the Montana coal, for the time being, is cheap and safe, let’s use it even though it’s a bit dirtier. I’m making this suggestion becaise we’re going to need an immediate transition fuel, not long-term. It’ll almost regulate itself because even though it’s dirt cheap now, it’ll get more expensive as the “low-hanging fruit” is used up and the coal companies have to begin digging sideways to get it. Right now, the mining is easy in huge open-pit mines, in a low-population region. That’s why it’s safe. It’s also not destroying villages and towns and poisoning children, as is resulting in West Virginia from the raping of the land.

Where I live, in California, most of our electricity comes from burning natural gas, and most of this is from Canada. This isn’t good. It’s expensive and the price of cooking and heating our homes will rise as a result. A little of our power comes from windmills, a little from a geyser. A little comes from the Four Corners area via a wide-flung grid. This is from near-mine coal. Gas is quite clean, but we still pay via global warming and combustion products. Obviously, there’s not enough gas to run the whole country; if we try this, it’ll vanish in a flash.

Right now, I don’t see any solution in our diving into electric cars. Not yet: guess where the fuel to power them will come from.

In the meantime, we should work like hell to do two things:

1. Reduce electricity consumption

2. Develop alternative energy technology and implementation as if it were a war to be won, an enemy to be overcome.

We should be talking about this issue now (hint, Chris).

We can do this, and it will be exciting and fulfilling as all hell.

http://wvgazette.com/section/News/2007052610

When will we rise from the Dead? ^..^

OK; we’re going to need to burn coal for a while longer, certainly while we transition to the wonderful green world of the future, whatever that’s made of. And alternative energy, clean and green, will come with or without Bush and his cronies.

But, for god’s sake, there’s no reason why blowing up mountains must be the way to get it out!

No way is exploding mountains and The American Apalachian Outback the only way to pull out that coal: ever hear of traditional mining?

This is just the most profitable way for Massey Energy and other sleazoids can create maxi-profit for their Wall Street investors. Strip mining wasn’t rapacious enough for these guys. And they own West Virginia’s politicians. It’s a cabal like Cheney’s secret energy meeting participants. And like Cheney, it festers in the dark.

There’s “cowboy coal” from Montana and other parts of the West, too — easy-access open pit mining. But considering that there are over 80 types of coal, with different kinds of pollution from burning each of them, there are some kinds of coal that you’d rather not have burned in your nearby power plant just on the other side of town. So, perhaps paying real live human miners to go deep into the earth, although dangerous, will still be the kindest way, even though it won’t be as profitable for anti-union Massey.

Mountain-Top Removal is a sanitized spin term: let’s call it what it is: exploding mountiains and wrecking communities. It does not keep our lights on at all: there are other ways to mine the coal.

http://www.theecologist.org/newsletter_view.asp

Everyone knows that coal mining is an ugly business, but seeing its full effects is not something many people get to do.

Now, in an extraordinary new series of independent documentary shorts, web-based VBS TV investigate the staggering environmental and human health cost of coal mining in West Virginia, USA. Ever seen an entire mountaintop removed so that contractors can get at coal underneath? You can here…

They link to a handful of videos …

http://www.theecologist.org/newsletter_view.asp

and Matthew C … I don’t doubt that we think we need this coal, but is “at what cost?” not a fair question to ask? The coal companies hardly do a great job of being clear about the costs of mountain top removal. They just deny that it happens, deny that it is destructive. We need to use less energy, all of us, and we need to get the energy we do use from less damaging sources, but we also need to know that coal mining is destroying Appalachia.