The War on Coal? Wyoming's future is at stake in the debate on coal

Wyoming Star-Tribune ^ | May 31, 2014 | By BENJAMIN STORROW

[Oldeconomybuyer]

There is little doubt among the students in Brandon Cone’s engineering class at Campbell County High School that a war is being waged against coal. The children of the mechanics who fix the mines’ great diesel trucks, the welders who staff their machine shops and the railroad employees who see the final product shipped across the country and beyond have obvious pride in the local industry.

“We power a lot of the country just from Gillette,” said Corey Silver, a junior whose father works at the Cordero Rojo mine, a comment widely echoed by his peers.

The students’ pride in the coal industry is matched only by their frustration with its critics. Coal, in their view, is misunderstood. It is not as dirty as its opponents make it out to be.

“It’s really actually clean,” explained Silver’s classmate Tanner Luthy. “There are so many filters on it. By the time any of the harmful, or what could be harmful gases, reach the atmosphere they are so little or so diluted it doesn’t even matter.”

And climate change, to the extent it exists, is a natural process, they say.

[Former Proud Canadian]

Wyoming is a white, rural state with two republican senators. There is not much diversity and the people busy themselves making a living and producing more goods and services than they can consume themselves.

Obama wishes such places, and the people in them, would simply disappear. Barring that, he will strangle them economically.

[Eric in the Ozarks]

That might be difficult to do.

[neocon1984]

Good analogy.

Small point: I recall that the Ellis oil fields were in Colorado.

[ClearCase_guy]

Yeah, I know: I fudged that part.

[Sequoyah101]

Then Wyoming had just as well get ready for a big change because there are not enough people there to matter.

The strategy goes on. Target small groups that can’t defend themselves.

[oldtech]

The Obama administration assures me there’s no war on coal. Thank goodness my electric rates aren’t going to “necessarily skyrocket.” Well,I’m not at all relieved because I recall that at sometime in the past,Mr. Obama did specifically say something about electrical rates “necessarily”skyrocketing. Mine certainly have not gone down. I’m so very tired of all this crap about CO2,which is not a pollutant,but plant food. If this is the main complaint about the use of coal,then there is,essentially,no viable problem with it.

[ProtectOurFreedom]

That was tongue-in-cheek snark on my part.

Of course there’s a HUGE war on coal. These freakin’ “best and brightest” idiots know what’s best for everything in the world and know precisely how you should live your life — from how your electricity is made to the type of car you drive to the education you get to where you live to the very food you eat and the medical care you are allowed to get. God Damn communism, every bit of it.

I worked in the energy industry about 25 years and, in the end, could no longer stand the politicization of the business and the weak-spined utility execs who couldn’t say “No” the the enviro-freaks. I suffered personally from the war on all types of energy.

[Arm_Bears]

If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say that the families of the children of the mechanics who fix the mines’ great diesel trucks, the welders who staff their machine shops and the railroad employees who see the final product shipped across the country and beyond all vote Democrat.