I wish improved safety oversight and regulation would be enough to prevent future disasters like the West Virginia mine explosion, but the reality is that the most effective regulation will only have a modest effect in the future.
The reason has nothing to do with regulation, which should be strengthened significant, but with coal itself. Coal requires physical extraction, which is horribly dangerous. The only way to prevent these deadly events in the future, as Jeff Goodell of Rolling Stone told Keith Olberman on Tuesday, “is to stop mining and burning coal.”
It can’t be done overnight, Goodell admits, because the United States “get(s) half of our electricity from coal.”
No one is suggesting that we stop burning coal immediately. But, you know, it‘s very clear in the big picture that the sort of era of fossil fuels is over, that we‘re moving away from coal in general.
Or, at least we should be.
The dangers and environmental impact of the extraction process bely the promise of future technological fixes on the climate front. Even if so-called clean coal wasn’t just a mirage, a pipe dream, the cost of digging it out of the ground is just too high and it will only get higher and higher and it’s just not worth the price.
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This is why we need unions. The owner (Blankenship) of this mine is rabidly anti union. Union mines are safer than non union mines because the workers get a say in safety conditions and can even refuse to go into an unsafe mine until the conditions are corrected.Blankenship is a thug, criminal and heartless creep. He doesn't give a damn if workers die or are maimed on his watch. There have been hundreds of violations at his mines. He just pays the measly fines which is cheaper than fixing things properly. He has bought politicians and judges, so he doesn't have to worry about going to jail. Of course this scum is a libertarian hero because he really socks it to the workers and puts the workers in their place.
Clean coal is one big joke. The whole process of extracting coal from the earth is filthy, an ecological disaster for the impacted region, whether it is coal mining, strip mining or mountain top removal type mining. There are coal mine fires that have been burning for decades such as the one in Centralia, PA which has been burning for more than 50 years. The town had to be evacuated over the years, because it was too toxic to live there. The tax payer was stuck with this cost.Germany, Austria, Spain, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway and Sweden have committed to weaning off of fossil fuels (and some of them are going off nuclear power, too) and going solar, wind, geothermal and biomass.
From thinkprogress.org (yeah, it's a liberal web site, do you have a problem with that..tough):Coal baron Don Blankenship, CEO of Massey Energy, complained last year that it is “very difficult” to obey “nonsensical” safety rules. On April 5, 2010, 25 miners died in an explosion at his Upper Big Branch mine in Montcoal, WV, which had racked up thousands of safety violations. Massey is appealing “at least 37 of the 50 citations for serious safety violations” the mine received last year. When asked in a June 2009 interview if he was concerned that Massey was complying with safety regulations, Blankenship derided them as “nonsensical”:They’re very difficult to comply with. There’s so many of the laws that are, if you will, nonsensical from an engineering or a coal mining viewpoint. A lot of the politicians, they get emotional, as does the public, about the most recent accident, and it’s easy to get laws on the books that are not truly helping the health or safety of coal miners. I think we need to be very pragmatic and very careful when we’re passing laws of that nature to make sure that we create as much safety and as much health as can be created for each of the resources we expend.What a vicious psychopath. Why isn't this corporate murderer being hauled off to prison?
As the resident little L libertarian, can you present some evidence that \”Of course this scum is a libertarian hero\”?Libertarians have very few heros — Jefferson, Adams, and Franklin come to mind. Unions are not the problem. Even evil owners are not the problem. The gooferment is the problem.You, yourself, indict \”measly fines\”, purchased politicians, and judges. In a little L libertarian world, there would be no one to buy. We'd have a voluntary society. But let's stick to the here and now.Where's the almighty union in mine safety? Where's the voters holding the politicians and judges accountable for the \”measly fines\”? And, finally, where is the Press exposing all the abuses?AWOL!!!Yet your biggest slur is reserved for the Libertarians.In what you call my \”libertarian fantasy world\”, miners would not work for the evil doer. Hard to mine coal without humans. But, we don't think like that because the gooferment is there to protect us. And, we lose common sense and an instinct for self-preservation.