The Kentucky King Coal Machine

So if any of you failed to read the Herald-Leader article by John Cheaves yesterday entitled “State tax money pays for coal industry’s mining promotion”, I would highly recommend it. I think the H-L archives articles after a few days, so you may have to find it elsewhere.

To give you the broad strokes from Cheaves’ article, our wonderful state government has given $400,000/year to the Kentucky Coal Association and their spin-off organizations to pay for what essentially amounts to a propaganda campaign promoting the ‘benefits’ of coal (does the coal industry even need any more power? seriously). Everyone’s favorite Kentucky celebrity and President of the KY Coal Association, Bill Caylor had this to say:

The environmentalists throw out a lot of negative stuff, like kids who are suffering from asthma because they breathe particulate matter from living near a coal-fired power plant, or deaths caused on the roads by big coal trucks. We’re trying to counteract that.

What? Are you serious? For an industry that employs only 0.3% of our state’s population and ends up taking more money from its citizens than it gives back, I still can’t believe that our state government is so clueless. And all of that money on top of the $300 million subsidy (which amounts to more than the state’s current $266 million budget shortfall) given to Peabody Coal last summer to invest in the not-quite-clean coal-to-liquid fuel technology with its yet-to-be-developed capacity to sequester carbon emissions. Brilliant, folks. Just brilliant. But still, the Kentucky Coal Association says that mountaintop removal is

simply the right thing to do, both for the environment and for the local economy, a true win-win

Sometimes I hear such ridiculous things that my brain quits working for a bit. I feel that way right now. Does nobody else think it is so painstakingly obvious that our unhealthy and unnecessary obsession with the coal industry in this state is, at the very least, part of the problem - or, at the very most, the root cause of our problems?

What the Farm Bill means…

I had been planning to put something together on the current farm bill to post. Instead, I’ll just redirect you to Robert’s post about it over at Documenting My Audacity. Robert’s post has some good redirects to other blogs that can explain the Farm Bill and its impact on agriculture, the environment and the rest of our society much better than I could dream of.

So while you’re at it, check out the blogs Robert links to:

Mulch

Blog for Rural America

and Eating Liberally

Fitz appointed to Environmental Education Council

I believe I’m a bit late in this, but Tom FitzGerald, Director of the Kentucky Resources Council and defender of all things good in the state, was named by Governor Beshear to the Kentucky Environmental Education Council. The press release that has been published reads:

Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear has appointed Tom FitzGerald to serve as a member of the Kentucky Environmental Education Council, to represent environmental interests.

I’m not sure about you, but it seems like we (once again) have our priorities mixed up if only one person out of nine on the Environmental Education Council “represent(s) environmental interests”. I recognize the bureaucracy and politically-correct games we have to play with the coal industry in this state. But on the Environmental Education Council? Geez. Sometimes this state is just too much to handle.

Regardless, it is great news for Fitz and the environmentalist community here in the state. Hip-hip-hooray!

Obama and ‘clean coal’

note: I apologize for letting this go nearly a week without posting right from the get-go. Well here is round two…

Not sure if any of you got these in the mail, but they’re floating around the internet now…

Obama also has a commercial out in Kentucky now (unfortunately I can’t find it anywhere on the internet to post- let me know if you can) touting his support for $200 million in federal subsidies for coal-to-liquid fuel generation (which may or may not have actually come to Kentucky). He teamed up with our own Senator Jim Bunning (R-KY) to author the atrocious “Coal-to-liquid Fuel Promotion Act of 2006″, which failed miserably and never got out of its committee (yes!). Needless to say, Obama is pretty far off base with thinking that ‘clean coal’ is any sort of solution for our needs for viable global warming solutions, energy independence or high-paying domestic jobs. Unfortunately, neither of the other candidates has a better opinion on the issue. Way back in the day (before the primaries began) I was an ardent supporter of John Edwards- I felt he had the most comprehensive grasp on the issues facing Americans. Unfortunately, he was doomed in this race from the beginning. He did, however, show that he understood the problems related to coal mining and mountaintop removal in the state (see KFTC blog about his visit last July). When Edwards dropped, I was fairly hesitant to throw support behind Obama because of his (lack of) stance on environmental issues. He is, quite unfortunately, just going along with the pack on this one. On the issue that needs perhaps the most innovative of solutions, the most innovative of the candidates has failed to come up with something even the least bit different. Just some thoughts.

Capitalism, War and the Environment

It may be a cop-out for my first post here to be a link, but I just read a pretty good article over at The Nation.

“The New Geopolitics of Energy” by Michael T. Klare

I think it’s rare for us to make the sort of connections that Klare does here - but we need to. I don’t really see any progress in trying to stop the war in Iraq, or even avoid potential conflicts with Iran, China or Russia, if we aren’t addressing the problems that make these wars ‘necessary’. As much as many of us want to decry the fact that we are in the war or that we burn oil and coal at ridiculous rates, we aren’t apt to change the system which creates this over-consumption that we are accustomed to. For whatever reason - politics, ideological differences, etc. - we aren’t willing to say that capitalism is what has gotten us into this mess. I think Klare makes that point, albeit a bit more discreetly.

I do have one significant criticism of his article, though. You’ll find that I’m not a big fan of coal (part of the reason I started this). So to have Klare say:

Any strategy aimed at reducing reliance on imported energy, especially oil, must include a huge increase in spending on… coal gasification with carbon capture and burial (so that no carbon dioxide escapes into the atmosphere to heat the planet)

means that even when we get close to ‘getting it’, we are still pretty far away from ‘getting it’. The talk of ‘clean coal’ is a myth - carbon sequestration technology, at least in the context of Kentucky’s proposed coal-to-liquid fuels facilities, is yet-to-be-developed. There is no promise in liquid coal. It is simply another means by which we’ll continue prop up this system that has led us into an age of significant global warming and wars that just don’t seem to stop. If coal is our energy future, it only means we’ll have to start sacrificing our own citizens rather than those in other countries.