You want to know why our environment isn't going to get any better?

[ThomWV]

Coal cost $65 a ton. To put that in your mind's eye a ton of coal would be a nice sized load in a typical full sized pick up truck. A ton of coal converts to about 2,000 kW of electrical power. That's enough to power 20,000 bright light bulbs for an hour. That's a lot of power. Let me repeat the first part - it only cost $65. A ton of dried chicken manure cost twice that much. Men will be crushed underground for that $65 dirt. Forests will be denuded for that $65 worth of filth. Streams, creeks, rivers, and lakes will be poisoned from water released in obtaining that $65 worth of coal. The air will be filled with mercury and carbon when the $65 coal is burned, there will be radioactive fallout from it too - no kidding. And finally when you think the damage is done, there is the ash. A finer carcinogen would be hard to find and mountains of it build up every day, as fast as real mountains disappear in Appalachia.

And Republicans oppose taxing coal. We should tax coal mining out of existence, that's what we should do.

[unhappycamper]

1. "We should tax coal mining out of existence"

The 'Clean Coal' crap we heard from dubya and repugs was just that. Crap.

Recced on your comment.

[TBF]

5. We should also tax billionaires out of existance.

I like the way you think.

[rock]

15. I especially like the way you think

Billionaires are a social blight.

[maryf]

26. K&R this post and the OP! nt

[primavera]

30. +1,000,000!

[Xenotime]

32. Agreed 1000%

[EstimatedProphet]

39. I'd prefer to beat them out of existence with a baseball bat, but that's just me

[JVS]

2. What would my home heating bill look like if I converted back to coal?

[ThomWV]

4. If you've got electric heat then about 70% of it already is

[JVS]

10. I have gas heat.

My parents live in SW PA and I remember being told that when they bought the house the basement was filled 2 feet high with ashes and that the little door blocked in with dirt I saw near the ground was where the coal truck used to dump it in. I will inherit the house someday and I'm wondering if I'll find myself re-digging what my father filled in. I'm not exactly eager to go back to coal, but compared to the natural gas companies using fracking and fucking up the watershed, it seems ok. Mountain top removal isn't a pleasant thought either in that regards. That leaves mining, which as you said can be dangerous, but at least it could bring some jobs back to my town, where the mines shut down along with the steel mills.

[Nicholas D Wolfwood]

7. Smaller and dirtier.

[ThomWV]

9. I helped tear down a small home that had used a coal stove for decades - Sweet Jesus!

This was a very small house, just 3 rooms, no indoor plumbing. When we started to tear the ceiling boards out there was an easy 6" of coal smoke dust build up and dumped down on us. It was the most horrible shit to breath in you can immagine - I'd sooner snort clear coat than breath that stuff again/ We ended up pushing the building over; we just couldn't go back into it and continue tearing it apart.

But yes, your point is exactly correct. The house would be small (or large and cold) and it would certainly be dirty.

[Nicholas D Wolfwood]

12. I grew up in one. Believe me, I know. (nt)

[mrcheerful]

16. I remember back before the EPA was formed how 75% of the homes in the city I grew up in

burned coal for heat. I also remember how whole neighborhoods were covered in black soot within hours after a fresh snow fall. Then there was the problem of breathing that soot into your lungs, nothing like snotty nose kids blowing their noses and the snot was black. Not to mention that soot ending up in the water supply. The problem is the people who grew up after the EPA have no ideal how dirty American life was. I remember every spring going over to the grand parents house to help clean the soot up, it was a every spring event just to keep on top of the soot build up, if not then you got conditions such as you posted about.

Also there was little thought of the dangers of burning coal given at the time, folks just said thats life and lived with those conditions. Btw, it wasn't just small homes that were heated this way, I've been in old Mansions around the city that had been converted into apartment complexes and it was surprising to see old coal boilers in the basements that had been converted from coal burners to natural gas burners, often using the same water pipes that transfered the heat from the coal to each room of the house. I also remember getting burned from touching those whatchamacallits filled with boiling water.

[Stinky The Clown]

3. Use clean coal

I heard about.

From Democrats at the highest levels of government.

Clean Coal

[Dragonfli]

29. Makes me want to bathe in it! Clean sparkly clean!

With coal like this bleach will become obsolete.
It may even make better milkshakes.

[Nicholas D Wolfwood]

6. +1, but totally impossible politically.

We have several coal mining states with Democratic Senators. And you'd have to be able to justify shedding all of those mining jobs - alternative energies may produce jobs as well, but they're fewer and higher skilled because of the technology involved. Meaning you'd put more low-skilled workers out of work in the process at a time when we have no place as it is for low skilled labor.

I don't disagree with you in principle, I just don't think what you're saying is possible or practical. A smaller tax on coal to fund alt energy research and development might work though.

[Fumesucker]

8. I put up an OP the other day about governments subsidizing fossil fuels far more than renewables..

I got one reply.. And that was from you.

http://demopedia.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x8863776

Frankly no one really gives a fuck.

[ThomWV]

11. Two concerned citizens are way better than none.

Next to the military/intelligence complex our energy policy, or lack thereof, is the most insidious aspect of the coopting of Government as I see it. But of course there is other stuff too. So much to be in a rage about, and so little rage left.

[glitch]

36. Lots of people really give a fuck.

We just aren't always here. :hi:

[Fumesucker]

37. Eh, take a look at some OPs that get hundreds of responses..

Like for instance an OP about Snooki getting arrested..

I'd never even heard of Snooki until that stupid OP drew posters like flies to an immense heap of dinosaur dung.

[glitch]

41. Well, I've never heard of snooki either, but I think sometimes people post

on shallow issues because the painful ones hurt too much. I don't assume it means they don't care, more like they can't handle it.

[Kolesar]

13. New coal fired plants cost $billions: several times what they cost a few years ago

So the price advantage of coal is not that great (especially when compared with efficiency spending).

[NoNothing]

14. Minor point

A kW (kilowatt) is a unit of power, but what light bulbs consume and what is stored in the coal is *energy*, measured in kilowatt hours (kWh). Lighting 20,000 100-watt bulbs would consume 2000 kWh, with a power level of 2000 kW. Lighting 1 100-watt bulb for 20,000 hours would also consume 2000 kWh, but with a power level of only 100 watts. Lighting 20,000 100-watt bulbs for 10 seconds would consume only about 5.6 kWh, but again with a power level of 2000 kW.

[theophilus]

17. But the quality of coal is going down. Like many other things,

we have about exhausted the great easy anthracite. We are heading down into the bituminous and are having to look at the lignite. "We" are already destroying mountaintops and our precious water. In other words, coal is becoming much more expensive to retrieve. It is all spinning down, just like petroleum. We are at a junction of peak oil, coal, industrial metals, and other things.

That is why the environment is going to get better.....one way or another. If we choose truly clean alternatives then we can have a happier future. If we don't millions will die and, in the long run, the remainder of the earth's creatures will be "happier" without us.

See "The Crash Course" by Chris Martinsen (sp?)

[ThomWV]

23. No it isn't

Not in the least. The reason the anthracite isn't being mined is there is no market for it. Most of the coal mined today is used for steam generation whereas the 'metallurgical' coals were used in steel making. We don't make much steel anymore. As it is coal is graded along three standards, BTU content, ash content, and sulfur content. When coal is found you find, clean, and sell what you find (if there is a market for it) and because the seams are more or less uninterrupted across the plateau once a seam of the sort of coal you want is found (they are very well mapped) you just blow off the top of the mountain until you get to it and then scrap it off. You will know with some precision what the quality of the coal you will encounter long before you even start blasting and pushing dirt.

[theophilus]

27. Well, please take a look at this:

http://www.chrismartenson.com/crashcourse/chapter-18-environmental-data

Is it not true? And if so, what exactly is not right about his views on coal and other substances. Thanks for your time.

[ThomWV]

44. Thanks for the link - yes I just read it - its sophomoric nonsense.

Its nice to read and the guy is just a wonder of opinions, but the stuff he says about coal has about the level of sophistication you'd expect from a teenager's grade-school report on the state of the resource. It sounds nice, but its just not accurate. This nation, and in fact this world, hasn't put a dent in its coal resources/reserves and will not in the next several hundred years.

You want to know how much coal there is available? If you were standing in my yard right now and dug a hole you'd have to go down approximately 50 feet to hit the first seam of coal. It would be the Pittsburgh seam, which is somewhat dirty (High ash and sulphur) coal that is commonly used, after washing, for power generation. It is not so important that it exists in quantities that it would pay to mine in my yard, what is important is that it also exists in every under every acre of land from here to a point about 300 miles south of here and 100 miles north of here and from the eastern mountains to the Ohio River. That's right, you you could open up a strip mine that would expose good quality coal the size of the state of West Virginia* - and that is enough coal to last for a very very very long time, even with rapid population growth.


* The coal seams exposed would be the size of WV, but much of it would be located in neighboring states, there is very little coal on the east side of the mountains, but its everywhere under the plateau. There are also massive deposits in the Powder River Basin (low Sulfur, low ash, unfortunately also low BTU content) out west and of course Illinois floats on a sea of coal.

[david13]

18. It isn't just coal. It's overpopulation. dc

[theophilus]

19. Yep, we're being screwn by screwin. Go figure. n/t

[The2ndWheel]

22. And it isn't just those two

You can keep adding to that list. Population isn't even #1 on the list. There is no #1 on the list. Overpopulation doesn't happen unless other things happen.

[Javaman]

20. Why this post doesn't get more recs is beyond me. Thank you for the

insight and info.

Cheers!

[ThomWV]

24. It got lots of recommends, it was the unrecommends that brought it back down

[ensho]

21. true

nt

[hunter]

25. I'd be more inclined to outlaw coal.

Ban new fossil fueled power plants and phase out the use of existing coal plants over maybe a twenty year period.

Taxes create an incentive to government to keep some balance of coal around. Better to kill the coal power industry entirely.

[Poll_Blind]

28. Son of a bitch, Thom...Thank you for that. That's probably the most in-perspective a...

...message as I'm going to read all day. I live in the NorthWest and at least in the area where I live there's almost no coal anything (at least for most private homes) so I had no idea.

Thank you! I'm going to be chewing that one over for a while.

PB

[jtrockville]

31. Coal is FILTHY. Everyone else pays to dump their garbage.

The coal industry should too. And the price for dumping TOXIC garbage should be high.

[primavera]

33. Agreed 100% - it's ultimately always about the $

Alternative energy sources are available and viable, they're just more expensive. Also available and viable are more efficient devices for converting the energy in oil and coal into electricity, the employment of which would reduce both consumption and emissions just as drastically here as they do where they are used in Europe, but, of course, they too are more expensive, so we refuse to use them.

Yet taxing energy or compelling more expensive ways of producing cleaner, more eco-friendly energy will invariably meet the legitimate criticism that, if you increase the cost of energy, poor people will freeze to death in the winter or be unable to drive to their jobs to support their families. This is why energy policy is inextricably bound to the problem of income inequality: when 80% of the country's wealth is owned by the richest 10%, the remaining 90% of the population who have to get by on only 20% of the country's wealth legitimately can't afford anything more than the cheapest of the cheap solutions. So we use dirty energy, knowing that we're destroying the planet in doing so; we buy MalWart goods made by sweatshop slave laborers in Sri Lanka, knowing that we're putting American workers out of work by doing so; we import our food from Third World countries, knowing that we're increasing the deficit and displacing US jobs as we do so - because we simply have no choice. You can't let your family freeze or starve, and, since we gave the country to the billionaires and are content to be serfs living off of the aristocracy's table scraps, the rest of us peasants don't have many alternative ways of accomplishing that.

[eilen]

38. What about this?

After 30 years, algae-to-fuel finally gets the green light

http://www.greenfuelsforecast.com/ArticleDetails.php?articleID=481
....
The $25 million Aquatic Species Program was set up in 1978 by the Carter Administration to investigate high-oil types of algae that could be grown for biodiesel. The project, run by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, found algae farms producing the plants in shallow ponds could supply enough biodiesel to completely replace fossil oil for transportation and home heating.

Scientists estimated the 140.8 billion gallons needed to fuel the country at the time could be produced by 15,000 square miles of algae farms. To put that in perspective, Arizona’s Sonora Desert alone is 120,000 square miles.

But by 1995, oil prices had settled down again and President Clinton's government was looking for budget cuts. The NREL decided to concentrate on ethanol and closed the ASP. However, its collection of more than 3,000 strains of algae is still open to researchers at the University of Hawaii and is widely regarded as the intellectual property backbone for today’s algae-to-fuel startups....

"Unlike ethanol from traditional fuel crops, such as corn and soybeans, which require considerable time to grow, use large amounts of herbicides and nitrogen fertilizers and consume just as much fossil fuel as the ethanol itself replaces, algae can grow in wastewater, even seawater, and requires little more than sunlight and carbon dioxide to flourish,” says Harmel S. Rayat, a director of International Energy.

[lib_wit_it]

42. Wow. This is fascinating, although I don't know what the ASP's collection of algae being "the

intellectual property backbone for today's algae-to-fuel startups" means exactly in terms of the likelihood that this technology will be be implemented and, if so, on what sort of timetable.

And how on earth did we, in the past, ever manage to make changes that led to the elimination of jobs in certain fields? Because the only way jobs can be eliminated now is if a bunch of effing multi-millionaires get to become mother-effing billionaires.

[eilen]

45. I read an interesting book

that described how carriage makers, craftsmen in their own right; became car builders and then assembly line workers. Basically, once Ford instituted the assembly line, the most talented carriage makers walked off the job. That is why he really had to raise the pay.

Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work
Matthew B. Crawford

[lib_wit_it]

47. Thanks! That sounds like a good read. : D

[earth mom]

34. Meanwhile, Obama calls coal "CLEAN".

;grr:

[blindpig]

35. I know! I know!

Capitalism.

As long as the profit motive rules the environment and human wellbeing take a distant back seat.

[Ignis]

40. K&R

:kick:

[whistler162]

43. Simple it is because we actually believe you

when you say it isn't going to get any better!

Compared to 40 years ago it has gotten better in many areas. Worse in others. For eamplelook at the Hudson River valley and Onondaga lake in New York as a few examples.

[rucky]

46. Biomass and RDF (refuse derived fuel) are even cheaper.

and reduce landfill waste. Industrial plants are hip to this, but the regulators need to catch up - the coal lobby is slowing down progress. But to say we'll never get there ignores the fact that Europe has already achieved 80% alternative fuel substitution for power generation and cement production. We'd get there faster without the coal lobby's influence, and if we start demanding it instead of holding NIMBY rallies every time a cement plant files a permit to burn something other than coal.