CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP) - Organizers of the Friends of America rally have added a karaoke competition to the pro-coal Labor Day event, but anger among environmentalists continued to mount Friday.
Coal producer Massey Energy and more than 100 associations and businesses are sponsoring the rally and free concert, which will feature country singers Hank Williams Jr. and John Rich, among others.
Earlier this week, the Arizona-based Center for Biological Diversity blasted Verizon Wireless for its sponsorship of the event, arguing it amounts to support for mountaintop removal coal mining and opposition to legislation designed to control climate change.
Late Friday, the group said more than 80,000 people had signed on to their letter to Verizon, including groups that represent millions of members. They include the Natural Resources Defense Council, Defenders of Wildlife, Rainforest Action Network, Greenpeace USA, Friends of the Earth, Appalachian Voices and Christians Caring for Creation.
Massey Chief Executive Don Blankenship has said the rally is designed to focus attention on the need to protect American jobs by ensuring they aren’t taxed or regulated out of existence. The rally Web site asks concertgoers to sign a petition against federal cap-and-trade legislation designed to limit greenhouse gas emissions.
and here’s the best part:
Blankenship told the Charleston Daily Mail on Friday that he does not believe in climate change and that the benefits of mining and energy production must be weighed against the environmental costs.
“You’ve got to either have energy or be willing to live in poverty and die young,” he said.
Burning coal and other fossil fuels is driving climate change, which is blamed for everything from western forest fires and Florida hurricanes to melting polar ice sheets and flooded Himalayan hamlets. On top of that, coal-burning electric power plants have fouled the air with enough heavy metals and other noxious pollutants to cause 15,000 premature deaths annually in the US alone, according to a Harvard School of Public Health study. Believe it or not, a coal-fired plant releases 100 times more radioactive material than an equivalent nuclear reactor - right into the air, too, not into some carefully guarded storage site. (And, by the way, more than 5,200 Chinese coal miners perished in accidents last year.)
Burning hydrocarbons is a luxury that a planet with 6 billion energy-hungry souls can’t afford. There’s only one sane, practical alternative: nuclear power.
We now know that the risks of splitting atoms pale beside the dreadful toll exacted by fossil fuels. Radiation containment, waste disposal, and nuclear weapons proliferation are manageable problems in a way that global warming is not. Unlike the usual green alternatives - water, wind, solar, and biomass - nuclear energy is here, now, in industrial quantities. Sure, nuke plants are expensive to build - upward of $2 billion apiece - but they start to look cheap when you factor in the true cost to people and the planet of burning fossil fuels. And nuclear is our best hope for cleanly and efficiently generating hydrogen, which would end our other ugly hydrocarbon addiction - dependence on gasoline and diesel for transport.
Some of the world’s most thoughtful greens have discovered the logic of nuclear power, including Gaia theorist James Lovelock, Greenpeace cofounder Patrick Moore, and Britain’s Bishop Hugh Montefiore, a longtime board member of Friends of the Earth (see “Green vs. Green,” page 82). Western Europe is quietly backing away from planned nuclear phaseouts. Finland has ordered a big reactor specifically to meet the terms of the Kyoto Protocol on climate change. China’s new nuke plants - 26 by 2025 - are part of a desperate effort at smog control.
It’s not the machines, it’s the electric power from the coal powered electric plant. That’s symbolic, of course. The amount of power used by one electric gardening tool won’t save very much. My goal is to use as little coal powered electric power as possible and to use and encourage solar and wind power. I already have a solar powered clothes dryer and my home has passive solar.
Well, I’m kind of lazy. The first 2 or 3 pages of google brought back recent stuff. I thought the source was in the 1930s or earlier, a book or maybe a silent movie (Charlie Chaplin?).
