Coal Industry

Rolling Stone, a music magazine in the same sense that MTV is a music-video channel, was featured on this morning's edition of Morning Joe.  Their cover story is not about the latest escapades of Kanye West or Lady Gaga; instead, they have chosen to write about global warming.  Before anyone asks, none of the above recording artists (to my knowledge) have recorded a song which would have spawned this article.

"As the World Burns," is the eyes-bleeding hyperbolic title of the article.  Contents: The 17 people whom Rolling Stone calls "climate killers."  And the first target of the article: Billionaire investor and ardent Obama supporter, Warren Buffett:

JOE SCARBOROUGH: You put Warren Buffett on that list, I thought he was an Obama supporter?

MSNBC's David Shuster declared yesterday's fake Chamber of Commerce presser at the National Press Club the "Best prank of [the] week" on his Twitter page shortly before 5:30 p.m. EDT today. He added a link taking readers to the left-leaning blog Talking Points Memo.

A group of liberal environmentalist activists punked some journalists by throwing a press conference claiming to represent the Chamber of Commerce. In the fake presser, the pranksters claimed that the Chamber was reversing its opposition to so-called cap-and-trade legislation.

In a follow-up Tweet, Shuster added:

A country boy can survive the Obama administration. Just ask Hank Williams, Jr.

The country music artist --  best known to millions of Americans regardless of their musical taste for his "Are You Ready For Some Football?" theme to Monday Night Football -- was profiled yesterday by Bill Lynch of the Charleston [W.V.] Gazette (h/t my NB colleague Tim Graham).

Lynch spent a considerable portion of his profile focused on Williams's politics, including his upcoming gig at a Labor Day TEA Party:

You know when a liberal has lost any capability to understand the common American when they completely miss the pain that liberal tax hikers cause the average citizen in this country. Charlie Cook recently showed this elitist attitude in a National Journal column on the outrageous costs of the Cap and Trade bill – better called the Cap and Tax bill. Of course, to him, the tax hike on the average American is not a big deal and he doesn’t understand how anyone could be upset over it all.

Cook is perplexed why Washington pols were “getting an earful” from constituents over the energy tax hikes that the Cap and Trade bill will force on the nation. He just couldn’t figure why adding “only” an additional $175 a year to the average citizen’s electric bill was such a big deal.

Remember the good old days—when dissent was patriotic?  Fuggedaboutit.  Dissent isn't merely unpatriotic now.  It's downright treasonous.  Just ask Paul Krugman.

If, like virtually all House Republicans and a handful of Dems, you don't agree with the likes of Henry Waxman on the need to take radical measures on the climate, you're guilty of . . . "a form of treason."  Treason against the planet, to be precise.

That was Krugman's formulation in his New York Times column of today, Betraying The Planet.

Krugman has obviously drunk deep from the carafe of Al Gore Kool-Aid, writing [emphasis added]:

NASA's James Hansen is looking to stir up trouble at a coal mining facility in West Virginia, and the CEO of the company about to be marched on isn't taking it lying down.

Quite the contrary, Massey Energy's Don L. Blankenship, whose company is set to be protested by Hansen and actress Daryl Hannah this coming Tuesday, has challenged the NASA official to debate him about global warming and West Virginia's economy.

As reported by WOWKTV.com Sunday, Blankenship issued the following statement concerning the matter:

Riding on a waning crest of bringing change to the United States and cleaning up the environment, Barack Obama is going head to head against Barbara Boxer on a big issue. There are 44 coal ash dumps that have been designated as a "high hazard" to the public. They contain arsenic and heavy metals from coal plants. Barbara Boxer has seen the list and wants to make it public, whereas Barack Obama essentially told her "No, ma'am." It's important to know if you're in the path of one in case it regurgitates a billion gallons of hazardous waste on you.

Green groups are seeing red over this betrayal of campaign promises to bring a new era of openness. In fact, the average Earth-conscious moonbat is going to do a chai tea spit-take when they read about this in the newspaper. (And just wait until they read about Obama deciding to let Big Coal blow the top off 42 Appalachian mountaintops to strip mine.)

But that's where the problem lies. Jump on over to Google News and search for the term "Obama Coal Arsenic". You'll find that you won't really find anything. Anything. In fact, the only mention in the entire vast United States media is a short little editorial in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

On Sunday’s CBS ‘60 Minutes,’ anchor Scott Pelley, who once remarked that global warming critics were the equivalent of Holocaust deniers, identified the American coal industry as one of the main culprits of climate change: "The future of our climate might be summed up in one question, what do we do about coal? Coal generates nearly half the electricity in the United States and in the world. But it is the dirtiest fuel of all when it comes to carbon dioxide, or CO-2, the leading greenhouse gas. A few days ago, the Obama administration declared, for the first time, that CO-2 is a threat to human health and it plans to impose limits."

Pelley’s story did feature a representative of the coal industry, Duke Energy CEO Jim Rogers, who actually called for limitations on carbon emissions: "It's my judgment it is a problem. We need to go to work on it now. And it's critical that we start to act in this country...Our goal line is substantially to reduce our carbon footprint, to de-carbonize our business, by 2050." However, that wasn’t good enough for Pelley: "Four decades? That's a long time."

Pelley followed up by citing left-wing global warming activist Jim Hansen: "2050 is too late. We will have guaranteed disasters for our children, grandchildren, and the unborn." Pelley explained: "Jim Hansen is NASA's top climate scientist. He's credited with some of the earliest and most accurate projections on climate change. He thinks that Rogers plan leaves the Earth in the oven decades too long."

After getting wiped all over the floor by Marc Morano in a March 27 global warming debate, and responding by childishly forbidding any articles of Morano's be linked at his Climate Progress blog, Joe Romm has set his sights on NewsBusters.

In an article hysterically titled "Newbusters jumps the shark (if that’s possible) in its attack on my truthful statement “windpower now generates more jobs in this country than coal mining," Romm took issue with some statements I made about his debate performance in my April 3 piece.

Romm's main beef (bolds and italics his):

For your Friday evening entertainment pleasure, last week Sen James Inhofe's (R-Ok.) former communications director Marc Morano debated Climate Progress's Joe Romm on matters relating to the global warming myth.

UPDATE at end of post: Romm hysterically responds to NewsBusters.

Presented courtesy of Roll Call TV (debate begins at minute 3:45, part two below the fold):

BMI's Dan Gainor has a great column on the Fox Forum about the silence around "global cooling."

This is the winter of environmentalists’ discontent. They desperately want the earth to be warming to prove Al Gore’s truth inviolate and they are going to make you pay thousands of dollars for it no matter whether it’s true or not.

But the weather has been inconveniently cold. Thirty-two states have experienced record or near-record lows this winter – poking holes in the predictions of imminent fiery doom. Just ask the die-hard global warming activists who showed up in Washington last week to protest the nation’s use of coal. Their event was hampered by nearly a foot of snow in the nation’s capital – enough to freeze out luminaries like Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.

Still, there they were, a couple thousand idiots standing in a winter wonderland, chanting about global warming. What’s amazing is that NASA’s climate chief James Hansen was part of this foolishness. Here we have a man who the left keeps telling us is so smart we need to listen to everything he says and he doesn’t have the public relations sense of a freshman communications major.

I have a news flash for Mr. Hansen – it gets cold in the winter. Sometimes it snows – even in Washington. If you want to promote global warming, look at a thermometer and wait until that red stuff climbs up real high.

“Oh, god,” why did he have to use that word? According to MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, the GOP “outsourced” the Republican response to a young, successful Indian-American governor who “had nothing to do with Congress.”

They had to outsource the response tonight, the Republican party. They had to outsource to someone who had nothing to do with Congress because the Republicans in Congress had nothing to do with the programs he was talking about tonight or the record he referred to.

First of all, one might point out that Piyush “Bobby” Jindal was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from 2004 to 2006. Furthermore, Republican governors are quite important members of the party. The idea that the GOP was bringing in an outsider is flat out wrong.

NASA's James Hansen has created an advertisement for a protest at the Capitol Power Plant in Washington, D.C., on March 2.

In the piece, Hansen claims:

We cannot burn all the fossil fuels without creating a very different planet. The only practical way to solve the problem is to phase out the biggest source of carbon and that is coal.

Is this what someone working for the United States government and paid with our tax dollars should be doing (video embedded below the fold):

While Capitol Hill is working on a "compromise" I thought it fitting to take a look at how the usual suspects in the media are dealing with Republican leaders that dare speak out and identify elements of the stimulus package that have nothing to do with stimulating the economy. For this task I turned to Rolling Stone Magazine and quickly came upon an article headlined "The Unserious Opposition".

In that article Rolling Stone Magazine Contributing Editor Tim Dickinson rolled out his Mother Jones bona fides with a predictable attack on Republican Senators after CNN published a Republican list of 32 wasteful provisions contained in the proposed bill.

With the simple phrase "And look at what the GOP considers to be pork in this bill", Dickinson takes the common path of those that can't stop living in the past and sarcastically twists the list to portray the Republicans as "Cheneyite" ideologues. In his logic however we find a convoluted line of reasoning that is misleading at best. It exemplifies the typical approach taken by gushing media types that have forsaken their watchdog duties to become members of the Presidential fan club.

As Nobel Laureate Al Gore warns Congress today about how the naturally occurring gas carbon dioxide is destroying the planet -- and gets a lot of press attention doing so, of course! -- one has to wonder whether anyone -- either on Capitol Hill or in the media -- will ask him how he financially benefits if the legislative measures he's proposing get enacted.

After all, as NewsBusters reported last April, Gore has made huge investments in companies that produce green technologies specifically designed to combat the "problem" he's been telling the world -- using his brand of junk science, of course! -- exists.

Now, with a new, green Administration in office, Gore wants our tax dollars spent on things he's invested in (from prepared remarks):

2008 was the safest year ever to be an American miner. The combined number of fatalities from all forms of mining was the lowest ever.

2007 (latest information available) also shows the lowest "all-injury" rate for miners on record by far.

Yet Ken Ward Jr.'s early-January contribution at the Charleston (WV) Gazette to the spate of final-month Bush-bashing pretended that this data doesn't exist. Instead he gave the impression of an opposite situation. Media outlets have been trying and failing to make this case since the Sago Mine Disaster of January 2006 (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog), even while the safety stats have generally showed nearly continuous improvement.

You'll see that Ward also uses a headline that will leave those who recall Barack Obama's campaign promise to bankrupt new coal-powered plants shaking their heads in disbelief (bolds after headlines are mine):

Climate realists around the world have contended for years that the real goal of alarmists such as Nobel Laureate Al Gore and his followers is to use the fear of man-made global warming to redistribute wealth.

On Monday, one of Gore's leading scientific resources, Goddard Institute for Space Studies chief James Hansen, sent a letter to Barack and Michelle Obama specifically urging the president-elect to enact a tax on carbon emissions that would take money from higher-income Americans and distribute the proceeds to the less fortunate.

The eco-socialism cat was let out of the bag on page five of a PDF Hansen published at Columbia University's website on December 29 (emphasis added, h/t Britain's Guardian, file photo):

Here's an announcement that will please atheists and climate alarmists alike: Christmas lights are bad for the planet because they cause global warming.

So says the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, Australia's national science agency.  

Bah humbug, I kid you not.

As reported by the Courier and Mail this Christmas Eve:

President-elect Barack Obama named Carol Browner the "czar" of climate and energy policy for the White House, but CNBC's Joe Kernen was wary of her appointment.

"You can see that even in Europe, some of the climate concerns, given this, this once in a lifetime recession, John - to put someone that, an advocate of such strong measures," Kernen said on "Squawk Box" Dec. 11. "Really I've seen her called Brownies or Brownistas. Um. That's a little scary with what's happening right now."

Earlier Kernen was discussing cabinet appoints with CNBC Washington correspondent John Harwood and pointed to new regulations Browner could institute:

If you needed any more proof climate alarmists are an extraordinarily deluded bunch that will do anything to protect their dogma, you got it Saturday when a 56-page report on military strategy incited ire because it included two paragraphs on global warming that don't perfectly fit Nobel Laureate Al Gore's agenda.

In fact, all the brouhaha was largely about one sentence: "In many respects, scientific conclusions about the causes and potential effects of global warming are contradictory."

Seems innocent enough, don't you think?

Well, not according to the Boston Globe's Bryan Bender, or any of the folks he chose to question about it:

Obama’s Flips Head to Head With His Flops

What the Lord Sayeth He then taketh Away… sometimes the very next day! If this video doesn’t show clearly how the media has allowed Obama to shamelessly flip flop on the issues, nothing does. Sometimes even from day to day Obama “nuanced” his way from one side of an issue to the other. Yet, the media never called him on it.

Appearing on the Election Day eve edition of "Fox & Friends," MRC's Brent Bozell reacted to the how the media, starting with the San Francisco Chronicle, hit the proverbial snooze button with Sen. Barack Obama's remarks about bankrupting the coal industry:

Everyone talks about the need for alternative energy.... The problem is that everytime an alternative comes forward, someone on the Left always shoots it down. That's why you don't have more growth in the coal industry or in the nuclear industry. The reason these things never come to the fore is because on the Left, they're always shot down in the final analysis. And Barack Obama just said it again, he's going to do it.

During the segment, co-host Brian Kilmeade noted that a McCain staffer Rick Davis said simply of the media's coverage of the campaign, "it sucked." Bozell agreed, hitting the media for bias by omission:

In reporting the speech by Gov. Sarah Palin in Ohio today, CNN’s Political Ticker tried to spin her question about Obama’s coal comment as old news when it clearly isn’t. Palin asked why we are just now finding out about the interview where Barack Obama said he had hoped to bankrupt the coal industry but CNN termed this interview and Obama’s startling admission as “months-old coal comments” in an attempt to soften the blow to Ohio and Pennsylvania voters. The Political Ticker said that since the San Francisco Chronicle had these comments on its website for nine months, the news of Obama’s quote was no big deal. But this is a misleading claim.

As we know from P.J. Gladnick’s NewsBusters report, Obama admitted that his intention for new coal plants was to slap so many fees, regulations and taxes on any new venture that it would “bankrupt” the company that tries it.

For many months, NewsBusters has been reporting the financial interest Nobel Laureate Al Gore has in advancing global warming hysteria, and has continually wondered when media will raise this issue to the American people.

On Sunday's "Meet the Press," Gore gave host Tom Brokaw the perfect setup to ask him about his investments in renewable fuel technology when the former Vice President mentioned how much money T. Boone Pickens has put into windmill farms.

Predictably, Brokaw missed this opportunity to be the first major, mainstream media member to ask the Global Warmingist-in-Chief about his own investments, and just how much he stands to make if America does indeed shift all of its electricity production to renewable sources of energy.

Here's the exchange in question (video embedded below the fold):

Today on Neil Cavuto, Monica Showalter of Investor's Business Daily was on, speaking about their editorial on Nanny Pelosi called "Feckless to Reckless." It's about Nancy Pelosi's recent reckless call to drain the strategic oil reserves in an attempt to answer our problems and pains at the gas pumps, short term. Needless to say, IBD was not impressed; in fact, the article calls for her resignation. You can read about it and watch the video interview at MsUnderestimated's site here.

During June 30th's "Larry King Live," Robert F. Kennedy Jr., senior attorney at the National Resource Defense Counsel, made a head-turning statement regarding subsidies to the oil and coal industry, and not a single panelist challenged him on it. Not that one would expect King himself to do it; however, the other panelists included Chevron's David O'Reilly and ABC's John Stossel. Relevant portion of the transcript follows:

JOHN STOSSEL, ABC'S "20-20": I think a lot of it is silly. I think we have an energy policy in America and the world and it's called the free market. When oil is above 100 dollars a barrel, coal, as he's saying, becomes viable. We don't need Washington to do it. It's a fatal conceit to say the politicians can lead this. Higher prices will lead to alternatives.

If there were a Society of Global Warming Alarmists, Bill McKibben might get kicked out for being too much of a worry wart . . .

You've probably seen those phone-message forms with check boxes in ascending order of urgency from "FYI—no need to return call" all the way up to "the future of civilization hangs in the balance." We might see that last category as light-hearted exaggeration, but it's no laughing matter to McKibben. In his jeremiad in today's LA Times literally entitled "Civilization's last chance," McKibben solemnly declares that "the world looks a little terminal right now" and "it isn't morning in America, it's dusk on planet Earth." OK. Just so long as it's nothing serious.

McKibben's lament is based in important part on a paper that James Hansen and several co-authors have submitted to Science magazine which concludes that "if humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm."

Government meddling with the free-market forces can have ill consequences. Just look at how government mandates for corn-based ethanol have affected the global food supply.

According to CNN senior business correspondent Ali Velshi, CNN viewers rate the economy as the most important issue and named gas prices as their number one concern. "AOL Money Coach" Hilary Kramer agreed with viewers, but regarded Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama's proposal as "valuable" when matched with alternative energy legislation.

"Absolutely right," Kramer said on CNN's May 5 "Issue #1." "That's why Barack Obama with a $150 billion package that he wants to jumpstart an entire industry alternative energy and clean technology could be very valuable, especially matching that up with legislation to force the use of alternative energy."

Last week, NewsBusters reported the peculiar occurrence of former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich appearing alongside current Speaker Nancy Pelosi in a global warming ad funded by Nobel Laureate Al Gore's Alliance for Climate Protection.

Included in this piece was an explanation the former Speaker offered at his website regarding this matter which sparked largely uncomplimentary reactions in the rightosphere as well as from conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh.

Two days later, Gingrich appeared on Fox News's "O'Reilly Factor," and answered Rush (video embedded right):

In Monday's Washington Post environmental reporter Juliet Eilperin wrote up a large article on Al Gore's latest climate heroics, headlined "Gore Launches Ambitious Advocacy Campaign on Climate." Gore has pledged to spend $300 million over 3 years "aimed at mobilizing Americans to push for aggressive reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, a move that ranks as one of the most ambitious and costly public advocacy campaigns in U.S. history."

Skeptics of catastrophic global warming theory do show up -- in paragraph 20. Before that, we learn Al Gore's putting together strange bedfellows: "One of its early ads will feature the unlikely alliance of clergymen Pat Robertson and Al Sharpton sitting on a couch on Virginia Beach, talking about their commitment to address climate change."

Eilperin also notes that John McCain is at least partially committed to Gore's global goals, and he also has the support of former Republican congressman Sherwood Boehlert. (She doesn't note Boehlert is the most liberal of Republicans and a Sierra Club favorite.)