“Barack understands” the plight of the coal industry, while Clinton has promised voters in the state she would put more money into coal programs.”

***

Heck! I’m no coal miner, and my childhood memory of the old coal-burning furnace in the cellar is a memory of noisy clunkers, bad odor and dirty soot, but I understand the plight of the coal industry.

***

“He came to southern Illinois and seen the devastation and the loss of the jobs in the coal industry,” said Randy Henry, who is identified as a miner for 31 years. “Washington, D.C., is not listening to us. Barack understands it.”

***

How does one get across a point in the sixty second time frame most devote to paying attention?

Teachers, politicians and mothers have been asking that question for years!

“He came to southern Illinois and seen the devastation and the loss of the jobs in the coal industry. Washington, D.C., is not listening to us. Barack understands it.”

I’d say that pretty well does it. Gives a bit of hope that after the election, someone who “understands” will sit down with the folks who are hurting and try to come up with a sensible solution.

Much smarter I might add than simply throwing more money at the problem. That’s just so old-hat in D.C. And except for ramping up the debt, lining a few pockets and holding out the promise of more pork, rarely solves anything.

In Obama’s case, I think he understands how important it is to listen, learn, understand and then working with those most closely affected, look for solutions.

No doubt it will take a while for us to become accustomed to this strange behavior. Identifying a problem and THEN looking for a solution.

For so many years, we’ve been doing it the republican way. Find a solution that guarantees profit for the mucky-ups and then go find a problem to fill the slot.

Cant wait for the day when we have someone in the White House who actually understands ... anything!

That’s the first, and biggest step.

But generally, the “silver bullet” concept is thinking that a single energy will replace, one for one, fossil fuels. 

Different places and different applications will benefit from different solutions.  My current location will never see solar energy at any scale or reliability.  Wind is a possibility, but offshore wind would be our best option.  Unfortunately, surface freezing is a problem that places like Denmark don’t face because of salt water.  But hydrogen…we could make hydrogen easily.

In the SW, hydrogen won’t be the answer…but solar will work well.

You’re right though, none of these energies will be practical without changing our consumption.

South Africa produces most of its own oil out of coal, at a cost far less than $126 per barrel.

Why can’t we?

http://www.ultracleanfuels.com/

read mcKibben’s “the defining moment for climate change.” do u really think james hansen is a starry-eyed idealist? what’s “realism” to u is seen as denial to most of us.

Silver Bullet? Redefine your consumption practices.

“Clean Coal”...that’s funny.  No matter how clean you make the combustion of it, you’ll still have to rip the top of a mountain off to get to it.

No, Marshall, there are no silver bullets.  But everyone is hoping for one…and that’s why we’re running around like a fart in a jar.  We don’t know how to conceptualize a world where there are many and varied energy sources.  We’ve built everything on fossil fuels.  And the big money is in centralization; a varied approach will also spread the money around.

Plenty of energy could be squeezed from hemp seeds.  But then again, we could eat hemp seeds too.  Sunflowers have plenty of energy in them as well, but at least in N. America, sunflowers are beset by a myriad of pathogens because they’re native to the continent.

Our problem isn’t a lack of solutions.  Our problem is a lack of ability to conceptualize a world fundamentally different than the one we inhabit now.  And the world we inhabit now is run by the politicians we elect; consequently, they have a vested interest in keeping things chugging along just as they are.

Ford and Edison were ready to build electric cars in 1914…and Edison was working on off the grid houses.  The price of being a real maverick is failure; if you rock the boat too much, you get thrown overboard.

“..At some point the environmental movement will have to accept that there are no simple, ideal answers to energy production and every source has its cost…”

Well Marshall, I’m surprised that you still think that anybody running for office, (not to mention several million more reasonably intelligent Americans) don’t understand this.

The arrogance in your assumptions is pretty overwhelming. (despite Obama’s inexperience?) My my…but…what more would we expect from you, who tags everything based on an ideological perspective of left as opposed to right.

It’s not ENERGY itself that has anything to do with left or right, but purely the acquisition of the resources needed for it. It wouldn’t hurt to have a general idea of the difference.

Here are some excellent places to start.

The New Geopolitics of Energy
Michael T. Klare

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/050208F.shtml

Portrait of an Oil-Addicted Former Superpower:
  How Rising Oil Prices Are Obliterating America’s Superpower Status
  By Michael T. Klare
  TomDispatch.com

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/050808F.shtml

Nobody has ever claimed that we don’t need to utilize other sources of energy, and while coal isn’t the best, (because there’s still a lot to figure into this whole ‘clean coal’ practice) I would disagree that there aren’t other ‘simple’ ways to generate energy, such as wind and solar energy, because it both could have already long been in operation, had the funds been spent accordingly. (My very first home – an OLD structure even then) had a solar heating system and that was 30 years ago. That wouldn’t work in places like the East, but it certainly provided a backup for a California home, which meant that I had to use far less gas to heat the place.

HOWEVER, here we are, all of these decades later, and there’s been next to no development into these alternative energy sources, thanks to the OIL industry who decided to make a killing off of it, and kill a bunch of us with it at the same time. So there ARE ways and means that many other less greedy countries, not driven by corporatism, have found to serve their energy needs. Their infrastructures are so much more advanced than ours that it’s really difficult to understand how the myth of American Exceptionalism continues to hold sway. Maybe because it only holds sway here in America, and everybody else on the planet has figured out that it’s now a myth.

Be that as it may, any politician with some imagination and intelligence would KNOW that energy is THE crises of the era, so it would be pretty stupid for any of them to rule the use of the natural resources that are available.

Something makes me believe that you confuse ‘experience’ with intelligence. Einstein was a genius before he got ‘experience’. One needn’t have ‘political’ experience to figure out that this civilization cannot be maintained without energy. And one needn’t be ‘experienced’ to understand that it doesn’t require aggressive wars to steal resources in order to get it.

Frankly, I’m surprised that this author is surprised that politicians, even ones as inexperienced as Obama or as stridently left as Hillary (used to be? is?), wouldn’t be shedding some of the rampant, unrealistic idealism that characterizes the left.  I don’t think one ascends to the level of running for the nation’s highest office with the starry-eyed utopian naiveté of a college student.  It was that kind of thoughtlessness that brought us the boondoggle of ethanol or the false hopes of bio-diesel; would you rather drive, or would you rather eat?

Yeah, contrary to enviro-religious propaganda, coal is one of our most viable energy sources.  It’s a dirty business, it’ll never lend itself to a “green” image and can’t be marketed by Whole Foods (though they’re happy to use it to power their stores), but it gets the job done.  At some point the environmental movement will have to accept that there are no simple, ideal answers to energy production and every source has its cost.  But I’m sure that if there’s a way to squeeze any energy at all from hemp, they’ll jump on that one in an eye blink.