Coal - The New Boogeyman

In 1977, Dr. Petr Beckmann, Prof. Emeritus of Electrical Engineering, Univ. of Colorado published a book called The Health Hazards of NOT Going Nuclear. In that book he showed how the political destruction of the U.S. nuclear power industry would necessitate the replacement of nuclear-generated power with coal. (Oil was out; the Arabs were jerking us around. They still are.)

The downside was the statistical increase in lung cancer and other ailments that would result from burning that much more coal. But no amount of facts were enough to compel the anti-nukes from advocating the dismantling of the nuclear power industry. They didn’t give a rat’s ass about where the replacement power would have to come from. All they cared about was that The Evil Neutrons be banished.

Dr. Beckmann was right, of course. Replacing nuclear with coal is unquestionably dirtier. Even with scrubbers on the smokestacks, you can’t get it all out, and if it goes up into the air, some portion of it going to end up — you guessed it — in people’s lungs.

The point Dr. Beckmann was making (among many others) in his book is that the alleged “health and safety reasons” for killing nuclear power were actually bullshit. Even when you include the “worst” nuclear accident in U.S. history (Three Mile Island...and “worst” is measured by the amount of media hype, blather, and bluster that ensued; no one died), nuclear power has a better health and safety record than any other source of large scale electrical power generation.

In fact, more people have died building hydroelectric dams. And there have been way more deaths, injuries, and health hazards due to those darlings of the green religion, the giant wind turbines, which don’t even pay for themselves. Hell...there have been more deaths and injuries from bicycles and lawn mowers than from commercial nuclear power in the U.S.

I’m not arguing pro-nuclear here. I don’t need to; the safety record of nuclear is indisputable...well, for anyone with enough rationality and intellectual honesty to consider the actual facts.

I'm not arguing anti-coal either, because even though coal accounts for far more deaths, injuries, and health problems (from the mining to the burning) than nuclear, there’s no replacement for it — not with oil at a premium and nuclear virtually extinct. Kill coal and your electric bill is going way up.

So why has coal become the new favorite whipping boy of Obamunism? For the same reason that nuclear did 30-40 years ago; political expediency. The global warmies have got everyone convinced that “we” are frying the planet with CO₂, and coal is the perfect new boogeyman. Can’t blame The Evil Neutrons any more, so now it’s The Evil CO₂, and the Agent of Death is coal. Hey...that’s what The Prezzident sez, so it must be true!

The only problem is, it’s bullshit. Here’s a news flash: The planet has been warming up since the last ice age; “we” didn’t do that. It will continue to warm up until we hit the peak of the current warming cycle, after which global temperatures will begin to decrease as we head toward the next ice age. If CO₂ were the cause, then increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide would lead the temperature increase. But the data show the opposite. First temperature goes up, and then the measured CO₂ increases.

That's because most of the planet's CO₂ is dissolved in the oceans. Human activity's contribution is minuscule by comparison. The solubility of carbon dioxide gas decreases as water temperature increases, so as the oceans warm up (without any help from people), more CO₂ is released. The global warmies have it exactly backwards.

The IPCC models are deliberately contrived to “prove” anthropogenic warming based on cherry-picked data. The anthropogenic global warming hypothesis is a fiction worthy of Hollywood, but scientifically it’s a pantload.

Coal hasn’t outlived its usefulness; not by a long shot. It’s just another political football, just like nuclear was. The masses have been snookered yet again. It’s easy when you have a scientifically illiterate populace that wants everything in superficial 15-second sound bites that play to their emotions. It’s not a conspiracy; it’s a fact. Politicians have been playing people for suckers forever.

And the consequences of falling for the bullshit are the same as always: People suffer, and the politicians thump their chests about vanquishing yet another phony boogeyman, and then paint themselves as heroes when they plod to The Rescue at a glacial pace, at our expense, dispensing palliatives that make for great campaign rhetoric but actually solve nothing.