Last weekend I attended a statewide conference of young citizens who gathered to address the threats of climate change. Power Shift Ohio included excellent speakers such as Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, educational workshops and panels. Most importantly, it allowed students to build solidarity in developing an action plan for Ohio’s energy future. Many people there had never even been involved in an environmental movement before, but they decided to act now, and that is monumental.
It is important because it demonstrates that young citizens know that another 10 or 20 years of a fossil fuel economy is not an option for their future. With wealthy automobile dealers in the Republican camp, such as Rob Portman, seeking election in the 2010 Ohio Senate race alongside Democrats such as Lee Fisher who say “we should keep an open mind about coal,” there is an immense disconnect between what the youth wants and what politicians are willing to do. The passion that is being amassed is rooted in knowledge.
Ohio State’s Mohan Kishen Wali, renowned plant and soils ecologist, has declared vehemently in his lectures, “There are scores of information out there on the state of the environment. It is criminal that we are still debating whether or not we should do something!”
In his lecture, he discussed the gross violation of public health and the environment that comes of coal mining.
The conference culminated with a demonstration against the controversial practice of mountain top removal, where millions of pounds of dynamite are used to demolish mountains in order to harvest their coal seams. In the process, local valleys are filled with tons of uprooted earth and streams are infiltrated with toxic chemicals. More than 500 mountains and 1.2 million acres of hardwood forest in the carbon sink of Appalachia have been destroyed. Recently Massey Energy, the coal mining company that OSU’s President E. Gordon Gee served on the board of for nine years, began to blast the last remaining mountain in the West Virginian Appalachia: Coal River Mountain.
Are persons defending this egregious practice familiar with the everyday reality of ammonium nitrate in local drinking water? Most politicians who are backed by the coal lobby will never know the rain of silica dust and heavy metals on garden beds and playgrounds. Gall bladders and kidneys aside, coal mining will kill the prospect for clean energy in the region. Coal River Mountain has been declared a primary site for harvesting wind energy in the Southeast, with a potential to provide 700 jobs, $1.7 million every year in tax revenues, and enough energy for 150 homes.
Coal mining must be stopped. We can fuel the flame against dirty energy by reducing OSU’s dependence on coal and voicing our demand for a sustainable, viable energy future.
5 comments
1) There was first in the 1970's the global cooling scam (see e.g. Newsweek April 28 1975 on the Internet); the government-paid scientists (90% of them are rejects of private enterprise) recommended to fight the new ice age by sending our war planes to cover the polar ice with soot in order to increase solar heat and so prevent crushing of New York skyscrapers by the new glaciers;
2) When that did not work we had the global warming hoax in the 1990's, proclaimed by mainly the same government-paid scientists (Dr. Hansen of the NOAA, for example); to prevent the massive heating, fires, flooding of coastal cities, disappearance of Florida, California, and Caribbean islands, massive hurricanes, global famine, and other catastrophic events we should nationalize oil and gas and coal and electricity companies;
3) after 11 years of considerable cooling we are now faced with the climate change flimflam where whatever happens with our climate we should nationalize oil and gas and coal and electricity companies; and why not our banks, car and insurance companies while we are at it. To prevent this catastrophe the best vehicle presumably is international agreements enforced by the United Nations world government.
As for the influence of carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas: on a normal day the atmosphere contains 10,000 ppm (parts per million) of water vapor and about 300 ppm of carbon dioxide. The government-paid scientists say that an increase of 100 ppm of CO2 over the next 50 years will result in a catastrophic warming. The thermal absorptivity of water vapor is 4 times larger than that of carbon dioxide; it follows that the CO2 increase will increase the overall thermal absorptivity of the mixture by about 1/4 of one percent. The production of methane from livestock flatulence and the rotting swamps (called "wetlands" by the environmentalists) vastly surpasses the influence of human-produced CO2.
There is the Global Warming Petition Project (see Internet) where 31,478 US independent scientists declared that there is no anthropogenic (human-caused) global warming; of these 9,029 are scientists with PhD degrees. Our environmentalists tried to sabotage this effort by submiiting phony names with phoney degrees - and then claimed the whole effort by the Petition scientists was a fraud. It took us 3 years and a lot of private money to verify the credentials of all the signatories and clean up the Petition of those saboteurs. See also Manhattan Declaration with more such signatories, plus a large number of scientific groups from other countries who state the same.
I am one of these signatories, MS and PhD degrees from UCLA, with majors in thermodynamics and heat & mass transfer.
I think to fight this communist attempt to secure a permanent hold on power should not be fought on the narrow grounds of more taxes - that is the losing proposition; where about 50% of the population is on some kind of welfare we will always be outvoted. The battle should be fought and won on the firm scientific basis.
4) And now we have "cap&trade" power grab.
SCAM - HOAX - FLIMFLAM - POWER GRAB!!!