COAL AND KYOTO

There were a lot of responses to and questions about Arabia in America.  After discussing them, we'll discuss how "global warming" is just a scam to de-industrialize America and has nothing to do with cutting world-wide CO2 greenhouse gas emissions.

John Boland made a very informed and cogent case for the safety and practicality of nuclear power.  Ryan M. asked about the role of natural gas, in light of The Natural Gas Solution from last May. Bill Gregory mentions the trillion barrels of oil in Colorado and Wyoming that can be extracted from oil shale with new in situ technology.

While I am all in favor of more nuclear power plants, they produce electricity and not gasoline to run our cars.  I focused on coal not for power plants but on coal-to-oil liquefaction plants to replace the 11 million barrels of foreign oil we import every day.

President Bush signed into law on December 20 the opening of 8.2 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico for offshore oil and gas drilling.  A start, but just that.  Florida's coast and that of our entire East Coast is not only off limits for drilling, it is against the law for oil and gas companies to even explore those parts of our continental shelf to determine just how much is there.

Natural gas burns amazingly clean and most any car on the road today can run on it with minimum modification.   Geologists are sure there are vast reserves of it offshore, enough to replace our foreign oil imports.  The enviros are determined that we never get them.

And while Shell Oil has developed a process for underground oil shale extraction, it takes four years to heat the formations up.  Shell expects to have a pilot plant running in 2010.  It will take a while, and I sure want it to work.  It remains experimental.

Coal-to-oil is not.  The Fischer-Tropsch method was developed in Germany in the 1920s, and with modifications and improvements is used today.  The technology is ready to go, the coal reserves are there in states with politicians who want to use them.  All that's in the way of independence from foreign oil is… of course, the enviros, as always.

"Kenny" observes that the Left fabricates enviro concerns and supports the Kyoto Treaty for the express purpose of economically crippling America.  The Hate-America impulse of the Left is what drives it to "retard domestic oil & gas production, oppose nuclear power, sabotage the war against radical Islam, resist missile defense, and support open border with Mexico."  Couldn't agree more, Kenny.

The grotesque phoniness of the Left on global warming is most clearly demonstrated regarding coal.  Pelosi Galore is forming a new House Committee on Global Warming, while Barbara Boxer is submitting a bill to ban all coal power plants in the country.  It's all hate-and-blame America all the time.

Meanwhile, China is opening a new coal-fired power plant big enough to serve the city of San Diego somewhere in China once a week.  Fifty a year.  Within eight years, China will have over 400 more coal power plants than it has now.

India is building a new coal power plant on average now every two weeks, and will have over 200 new plants within eight years.

China's coal use alone will within a decade exceed that of all industrialized countries in the world (yes, Senator Boxer, that includes us), and will surpass by five times the reduction in greenhouse emissions called for in the Kyoto Protocol.

So why isn't Algore in Beijing condemning the Chicoms for destroying the planet?  Or Barbara Boxer or any other Lefty?  Because they are not anti-global warming so much as they are anti-America.

They are also, naturally, anti-science.  When Steve W. asked if I could help with research on natural vs. man-made CO2 emissions for his 7^th grader's school report, I was happy to tell him about a climate study in the British science journal Nature (March 11, 2006) showing that over the last 11,000 years there is no connection between global temperatures and global CO2 levels.

I also recommended Dennis Avery and Fred Singer's just-published Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1500 Years.  The authors cite data that shows the rise of average global temperatures during the 20th century preceded that of rising CO2 levels.

Most of the warming in the 20th century took place before 1940 — well before the vast increases in man-made CO2.

"Global warming" is a pristine example of faith-based science, believed in by members of the Church of Hate America.  But not all Democrats are members of this church.  That's why the battle between Democrats over coal and Kyoto will be so interesting to watch.