Coal executives at the Hearing April 14th (click for more)

The Arctic, the far north, northern Canada and Alaska, are all seeing electric storms that have never been seen before.   Indigenous people in the far north have no words in their language for “lightning”.   The atmosphere has 5% more moisture in it than it had 40 years ago, which is leading to wild temperature changes and electrical storms in places where they didn’t used to occur — with varying and disturbing consequences.  Birds are migrating out of sync, animals are going extinct at a rapid rate, we are burning through water and top soil like never before — our planet is in an obvious climate crisis right now.   Climate change keeps progressing,  and desperate coal executives are seeing support for their industry begin to slip away (as it should). Last week there were fireworks over coal during hearings in Washington.

From  Greenwire – Executives split on carbon caps, climate science

“A trio of executives from the world’s largest coal companies told Congress last week on April 14th that their industry is providing the fuel of the future [an insane claim] . . . . Under scrutiny from Chairman Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and other Democrats on the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, — and under fire from protesters who briefly disrupted the hearing — top executives from Peabody Energy Corp., Arch Coal Inc. and Rio Tinto PLC all called coal an irreplaceable source of energy in the United States and abroad. They stood united on the need for federal support for carbon capture and storage technology that would prevent emissions from coal-fired power plants from entering the atmosphere.”

CCS (Carbon capture and sequestration) technology could be ready for commercial-scale use sometime in the 2020s, said Peabody CEO Greg Boyce.   [whether it will work or not is another thing entirely]  But the consensus broke down over carbon regulation.  Boyce blasted the House-passed energy and climate bill (H.R. 2454 (pdf)) that would put a price on carbon emissions. Congress should wait until carbon capture and storage technology is ready before it regulates carbon, said Boyce.”

Congressman Markey responded by saying that there will absolutely be a price put on carbon so they should cooperate and work with the Senate.  We cannot wait years for carbon capture because climate change is progressing too quickly.   It will be 10-20 or more years until CCS works on a large scale.    If, as they claim, coal is “irreplaceable” what is their plan when it runs out? Like all fossil fuels, it’s finite. I guess they plan on manufacturing coal somehow, or perhaps blowing up more and more land in search of the coal that is hiding.

Unfortunately, these hearings were not advertised well, and there is no video either on the Select Committee hearing website or on C-SPAN. (Government transparency continues to fail us) . . .

On that [...]