Agreed. Bet most of the SS security team took a coffee break with the coal miners as the backdrop. Because no one (outside of OWS or Code Pinkers) would be stupid enough to tangle with a coal miner. The other folks you don’t want to test are the rubber workers. Until you see what a layup man does to fabricate tires all day, you have no idea what a tough job is.

Now that’s a winning ticket to the highly educated American public.

I’ve been posting this since 2008:

Twenty-six states produce coal. The major coal-producing states are (in descending order as of 2000, with annual production in thousands of short tons):

Wyoming (338,900).
West Virginia (158,257)
Kentucky (130,688)
Pennsylvania (74,619)
Texas (49,498)
Montana (38,352)
Illinois (33,444)
Virginia (32,834)
North Dakota (31,270)
Colorado (29,137)
Indiana (27,965)
New Mexico (27,323)
Utah (26,656)
Ohio (22,269)
Alabama (19,324)
Arizona (13,111)

Total United States: 1,437,174

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_mining_in_the_United_States

Somebody, please pay attention.

Drill and build nuke plants. Don’t disfavor oil. Natural gas is great, but it’s not saving the planet. It sucks as a fuel for a passenger car. It’s great for cooking and heating water. Cease entirely trying to herd the people into different ways of living. We need cheap gasoline and cheap electricity. Unleash the economy to deliver them. THAT’s an energy plan.

Again, we’ll see.

Oh, and one more thing — Yucca Mountain should absolutely be revived, with transfer stations located upwind downwind of Harry Reid’s properties and statutory limits on liability for releases during transfers.

FIFY

CO2 is not a pollutant. Strip the ability of the EPA to regulate anything to do with CO2 or ‘Carbon’.

slickwillie2001 on August 21, 2012 at 10:46 PM

Beg to differ on this. Let EPA regulate carbon MONoxide (deadly in high concentrations) but not carbon DIoxide (totally harmless).

Energy production and consumption is a huge issue, which goes far beyond what people pay for gasoline. If oil prices rise, the price of diesel fuel rises, and it is more expensive for suppliers of anything (including food) to ship products to market by truck, making EVERYTHING more expensive. If electric power costs skyrocket (which Obama wants), it costs more to air-condition stores and refrigerate products at supermarkets–which also raises food costs!

If we produce more of our own oil (or buy it from friendly Canada instead of the unfriendly Middle East), oil prices will drop, reducing prices for shipped goods across the board, and everyone gets more bang for the buck. If the huge gas reserves in the Marcellus shale (and elsewhere) are tapped without government interference, natural-gas prices will plummet relative to oil, leading many homeowners to switch from oil to gas heating, which will free up more oil for the transportation market (cars, trucks, and planes), as refiners will favor production of gasoline, diesel and jet fuel over heavier heating oils. Also, if natural gas prices plummet, electric power companies will favor gas-fired turbines over coal, leading to lower pollutant emissions per kilowatthour of energy produced, and cleaner air. A win-win situation for everyone, if the market is allowed to work!

Obama signing Keystone is on the Oct. surprise menu as the Nebraska humpback, 3 legged flea miraculously gets off the endangered list…

hillsoftx on August 21, 2012 at 9:30 PM

…which would mean nothing because if elected again…someone (surogate) would sue to stop it again.

Wanderlust on August 22, 2012 at 2:44 AM

Excellent comment. One thing I’ll mention about the coal to oil conversion… It is a VERY nice conversion because coal is energy dense to start with. You can produce oil from just about any input, but its only cost effective if the input is already energy dense. Otherwise, it requires many many times more input and becomes too costly. Coal is perfect for conversion.

And the reason that I admire the plan I described in my earlier comment is that it produces both electricity and oil using one input (coal). And as a backup, you can include in a coal burning plant in case you have to take the nuclear one offline. And you still only have one input!

So you’re describing coal regulations as blocking ‘entrepreneurship’?

bayam on August 21, 2012 at 10:01 PM

There you go again, assuming that the US is going to underprice China or other developing countries. The future lies in innovation and technology, not beating down US wages or dreaming that a energy prices are a barrier to entry for manufacturing the US.

bayam on August 21, 2012 at 10:12 PM

Only a fool thinks that the only way to get energy out of coal is to burn it and “pollute up the environment”.

The best innovative energy plan I’ve seen involves using coal.

LIQUID
FLOURIDE
THORIUM
REACTOR

Alberta_Patriot on August 21, 2012 at 9:57 PM

Thorium can be extracted from coal. We ran thorium reactors back in the 60′s. They’re one of the safest nuclear reactors since the reaction isn’t self sustaining without the fuel rods. They use liquid salt for cooling (instead of pressurized water). The designs I’ve seen rely on a two chamber design… with the upper chamber being the reaction chamber. If cooling shuts down, a plug between the chambers melts and the liquid thorium mixture drains into the bottom tank where the reaction shuts down and the mixture hardens. The reason we never really pursued it commercially is because it doesn’t produce any by-products that can be weaponized.

The second part, is the conversion of coal into oil. WWII Germany used that to produce a large amount of the fuel they used in the war. I saw an article 2-3 years ago from a university where they had been able to get the production of oil down to the equivalent of $1/gallon. That reaction requires heat. I’m sure they’re working on scaling the process up to work on a large scale.

Combine the two, using the excess heat from the thorium reactor to run the coal to oil conversion, and you have a way of producing massive amounts of electrical power, and oil, from coal, very very cheaply.

So yeah… coal regulations can very much hamper energy innovation!

As Japan, Germany and other northern European countries have proven, you don’t need to try to reproduce third world conditions in order to succeed.

bayam on August 21, 2012 at 10:12 PM

You spout ignorance and try to make yourself seem smart while doing so. Germany and other northern European counties have only proven that socialism creates poverty. While leftists such as yourself hyperventilate about how prosperous Germany is, the fact is, if it were a US State, it would be the fifth poorest. Don’t believe me? Here’s the link. Now this report is 8 years old and with 4 years of Obama working his magic on the US economy, Germany may have moved up a bit, but facts are facts: your ignorant views only create poverty.

1) Removing all subsidies in the federal tax code and via direct payments and price supports for anything.

2) Getting rid of the EPA (and any other parts of the government having to do with energy development, resource utilization or other such items) letting the States handle the problems of pollution as it is more local than federal, and on those things that States wish to work across borders they can do so as long as they stick to the more generalized powers described in Art. I, Sec. 10 and adhere to the 14th Amendment. That means that the federal regulations drop out of the equation and that companies must deal with States, and are not beholden to Congress: if you got corruption, deal with it at a lower level, don’t push it up to the federal level. Mining, drilling, refining, and pollution standards are local concerns. The goal is federalism, not national control by the federal government.

3) Put in a prize award system with guaranteed purchases for meeting price points for anything the federal government wishes to invest in, make ‘superfund’ land available at a penny per year for companies willing not only to utilize it for productive use but put a long term clean-up plan in place (ex. refineries or new tech systems). Lay out goals for energy production, storage, transportation, and capacity with an aim towards lower cost generation, higher energy yields, decreasing cost of transportation and increasing storage capacity… something like a 1 megawatt plant from e-stat fusion or a room temperature super-conductor with specifications for how many miles/year the federal government would purchase at what price to lower the overall cost of lighting federal buildings by removing resistance and impedance. Pay in tax-free prize awards, cash, then make contracts available to all suppliers of such technology.

Policies drive plans.

If you have plans without an overall policy, then you are just making up talking points as you go along.

Team Romney must first lay out the policies, and goals, then what plans are driven from those so that people understand the general direction they want to go in. Simple to understand, easy to state and the technical points are driven by the highest level, they are NOT the drivers for the highest level, at all.

It’s time to put a halt to the left’s green energy complex with their rich leftist cronies.

“No more blood for windmills” or something like that.

If you apply the principles of the laws of Thermodynamics to markets, you have a situation where the “outside forces” acting on markets to create more wealth are a) agriculture; and b) resources development.

A growing market simply cannot be sustained in the long term where these two sectors are artificially curtailed (see also, the economic destruction of the EU). Manufacturing adds value to basic resources but at multiples much less than those which come from mining (and depend on low-cost raw material inputs; see also, Australia’s dying manufacturing industry). Sales and services industries cannot exist without manufacturing and mining. And we must all eat.

A “let’s sit on our collective a$$es energy policy, where we wait for mother nature to shine, rain, and blow us into prosperity, is not only the height of laziness, it is economic suicide. But the watermelon green crowd knows this, and actively promotes this outcome.

Robert Bryce lays out four conditions for energy development and application that so-called “green energy” schemes fail the test on in every sense:

1. power density;
2. energy density;
3. cost; and
4. scale

To which I would add a fifth, “portability”. While you cannot directly power cars with coal, you can power them with gasoline and natural gas. Both offer significant advantages over any other kind of fleet fuels.

The articles Bryce has written on his site absolutely demolish any thought of “green energy” schemes as being ready to provide baseload power or substitute transport fuel on anything other than an isolated scale. Although I am a proponent of nuclear power, Bryce argues that the technological advancements in unconventional gas extraction essentially moot the requirement to build more nuclear reactors in any place where a natural gas pipeline already exists. And for anyone dreaming of a green future under nuclear fusion, good luck with that: the peacetime research into fusion has absolutely no market driver whatsoever to bring fusion into commercial power generation. None.

Finally consider this: if Israel applied the “green” model onto its water management strategy, it would never have built massive desalination plants – and vast swaths of Israel would remain a barren, lifeless desert.

Without energy production from fossil fuels and nuclear power (all coming from mining, I will add), developed countries will whither away and die economically, one by one.

See also, the EU.

Forgive me, Canopfor. I was trying to be cute but I outsmarted myself.

Alberta ain’t my name, it’s where I’m from.

Alberta_Patriot on August 21, 2012 at 11:06 PM

.
Wow, that never happens to me . . . okay maybe once . . . . . . . FINE, more than once . . . the point IS, it hardly ever happens to me.

So why should you be experiencing this difficulty, hmmmmmm?

Funny that, it must kill you Libs to know tha Duke Energy is bankrolling the DNC convention in Charlotte?

You did know that the CEO of Duke is one of Obamas bestest buddies right?

whbates on August 21, 2012 at 11:03 PM

THis is true. Duke’s CEO is a leftist freak that gives less than two s#&7s about the ratepayers.

Instead, it should be a slate of initiatives — no one of which is a deal breaker — but pushed as an “all of the above” package. Nothing should be dependent on anything else.

And all the “let’s spend 3 therms of fossil fuels making 2.8 therms of ethanol” BS should be terminated with extreme prejudice, along with the “we’ll all invest in solar with a payback at 2 lifetimes” fallacies.

Oh, and one more thing — Yucca Mountain should absolutely be revived, with transfer stations located upwind of Harry Reid’s properties and statutory limits on liability for releases during transfers.

canopfor on August 21, 2012 at 10:04 PM

“Alberta” ain’t my name, bro. :D

Alberta_Patriot on August 21, 2012 at 10:09 PM

Alberta_Patriot:Otay,so,your not from Canada,just curious!

canopfor on August 21, 2012 at 10:20 PM

Forgive me, Canopfor. I was trying to be cute but I outsmarted myself.

Alberta ain’t my name, it’s where I’m from.

Like many Canadian “small C” conservatives, I’m drawn to sites like Hot Air because we tend to live vicariously through our brothers to the south.

And we also love thier country more than their First Lady does.

So you’re describing coal regulations as blocking ‘entrepreneurship’? Are yous actually that out of touch with reality or planning on a future career at Duke Energy?

…………………………………..

bayam on August 21, 2012 at 10:01 PM

Funny that, it must kill you Libs to know tha Duke Energy is bankrolling the DNC convention in Charlotte?

You did know that the CEO of Duke is one of Obamas bestest buddies right?