Aug 8^th

According to Cal Thomas the President’s goal is bankrupting the coal industry. He assumes this is true because the President once said, “… that if somebody wants to build a coal fired power plant they can. It’s just that it will bankrupt them…”  Cal Thomas seems totally unaware of the tremendous increase in natural gas finds in this country and that natural gas competes with coal. He also has no idea of the insidious history of the coal industry’s willingness to risk the lives of miners to make a few extra bucks. The Sago mine disaster in 2001 killed twelve West Virginia miners and the cause has been batted back and forth for years. The mine’s safety record had been appalling prior to the accident… but, of course, spending money on safety might cost jobs.

I know something about coal mining and what happens when you burn coal. I lived in Pittsburgh and close to Pittsburgh for eleven years. When I went to high school I lived across the road from abandoned strip mines, hundreds of acres of abandoned strip mines. The mining companies bought the mineral rights from farmers if there was enough coal underground to make removing the overburden to get at the coal profitable. If it was, the excavated overburden, devoid of topsoil was left where it was and the coal company moved on.

Eventually the state decided that the coal companies had to deposit a considerable sum per acre for each acre they planned to strip. They could recoup that money when they leveled off the areas, covered them with topsoil and did some planting. There was an eruption exactly as there is now with cap and trade: coal company owners said that coal prices would skyrocket, miners would lose their jobs and the industry would disappear. It didn’t happen.

Pittsburgh was the center of the soft coal industry; I lived there too. That was in the late 1940s and early 1950s; it’s different now because of environmental regulations. In 1949 you could not sit down outside, either on the grass in a park, or on a bench at a bus stop. If you did your pants with be streaked with black soot when you got up. A white shirt worn in the morning had to be changed if you were going out to dinner because the top of the collar would be black. Thanks to those despicable EPA regulations, you know the regulations the Cal Thomas types are always claiming will be the downfall of the country, Pittsburgh is now considered one of America’s most livable cities.

Cal Thomas really has done little to enlighten us about the effects of burning coal. I believe he knows that because about two-thirds of the way though his piece he shifts, segueing, albeit clumsily, to criticizing the President for not commenting on Planned Parenthood. Then, apparently not satisfied that he has yet been sufficiently critical of the President, he slips in the failure to destroy ISIS. It does seem to me that Cal Thomas would do well to understand the importance of regulating the coal industry before advancing to other topics he also knows little, or nothing, about.