War on Coal

When I drive back to Washington, I go through the mountains of Pennsylvania, and I often see signs demanding that Obama stop his war on coal. (Our president must be a very busy man to do all the things the Ultra-Right accuses him of doing.) On the same journeys, I run through a lot of areas where we are fracking for natural gas.

The problem with coal is not that the president hates it. The problem is that it is (to quote someone who was writing about steam locomotives) an ugly, dirty fuel. People die to get it out of the ground. It needs to be transported in huge trains. When it's burned, it releases sulfur and mercury and a lot of soot. And finally, of course, it leaves ash which must be disposed. It corrodes its boilers and generally causes a mess. None of those problems occur with natural gas. Yes, the fracking process is questionable, but once the stuff is out of the ground, it's a lot easier (and cheaper) to live with than coal, not to mention less likely to injure the people who must live near the electric plants.

At the moment, we also are being told that Obama is making war on the fracking process. Is this the same as raising legitimate concerns about safety?

Now we have the Charleston, WV issue of a mystery chemical that's used to clean coal getting into the water supply. I'm just waiting to see how this one plays out. According to one source I read, this chemical is quite obscure and nobody knows what it does to people when it gets into the water supply. Given the far right's tendency to personalize everything and to make every problem the result of an evil decision on the part of the President, I suppose they will have him kicking a hole in the holding tank the chemical came from. But won't that boost the fortunes of natural gas?

No, the real war here is between an older, more problematic technology and a newer one that promises to be cheaper. That's all.