There's nothing that can replicate the smoky flavor of char, so when I've got the hankering for it, I tell my wife that I'm taking care of dinner. I have three different types of barbecues - a coal, gas and smoker - so I can experiment a lot.
First of all, the idea that natural gas is better than coal is a lie, especially when it comes to fracking for natural gas. It is a lie that was bought into by a lot of Democrats and a lot of environmentalists because I think they wanted to have a win against something; against coal.
Gas grills are a no-no. Gas is a petroleum product. Rather than a smokey flavor, it will add a a petroleum-based weird taste into your meat. However, if you already have a gas grill, you can bring in some smoke flavor by tightly rolling wood chips in tin foil really tight and placing them on the top of your burners.
Today, natural gas now outstrips coal as the leading provider of electricity in America. If this is as big as people believe it is, natural gas will soon be powering trucks and marine ships. Maybe even standard commercial cars that people use at home through compressed natural gas, other gas to liquids. The potential is there for more energy independence by America and a reliance on cleaner fuel - natural gas emits half as much as coal, in terms of carbon emissions. That's a real bounty.
Donald Trump has got old-time loyalty, that's why people like him. He keeps his promises. He said he was going to take care of the coal miners and he stayed with the coal miners. People tell him there's no coal, he still stuck with them. He's attuned to them. The air and the pollution, it's all there, but he sticks to what he says he's going to do.
Natural gas emits only half the carbon dioxide of coal when burned, but if methane leaks when oil companies extract it from the ground in a sloppy manner - methane is far more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide - it can wipe out all the advantages of natural gas over coal.
It is very different to make a practical system and to introduce it. A few experiments in the laboratory would prove the practicability of system long before it could be brought into general use. You can take a pipe and put a little coal in it, close it up, heat it and light the gas that comes out of the stem, but that is not introducing gas lighting. I'll bet that if it were discovered to-morrow in New York that gas could be made out of coal it would be at least five years before the system would be in general use.
There's no question that natural gas is a lot better than coal or oil, in the sense that natural gas produces less carbon per unit of energy produced.
The Invisible Man, who said to his wife, I don't care if it looks silly, don't stop! Never got a dinner!
Grilling grapes may sound crazy, but the smoky, blistered char they get from a few minutes on the fire gives them a deep, winelike character.
Coal used to be a very dirty fuel but coal has become cleaner and cleaner over the decades. Clean coal now is quite clean. Clean coal now has the same emissions profile as natural gas. Clean coal can become cleaner still. We can take even more of the pollutants out of coal and I believe we should. Clean coal, I think, is the immediate answer to Canada's energy needs and the world's energy needs. There are hundreds of years available of coal supplies. We shouldn't be squandering that resource. We should be using it prudently.
Alexander Graham Bell's wife, who said to Alex on their wedding night, Your three minutes are up. Never got a dinner!
The blockade against American natural-gas exports needs to be lifted, and the war on coal needs to be ended, so that, instead of being wasted to replace perfectly good coal-generated electricity, our natural-gas exports can be expanded even further.
While it's typical to find steamed clam recipes which include a bit of bacon or sausage, you might not think of adding shredded ham hock, but it's another way to pair the lusty, smoky flavor of animal fat with the briny ocean flavor of shellfish.
Artists are useful to society because they are so sensitive.
They are supersensitive.
They keel over like canaries in coal mines filled with poison gas,
long before more robust types realize that any danger is there.
The cities that I go to where I can tell that they have a lot of different types of drag, I tell them that they remind me of Brooklyn, and I mean that as the highest compliment in the entire world.
Compared to coal, which generates almost half the electricity in the United States, natural gas is indeed a cleaner, less polluting fuel. But compared to, say, solar, it's filthy. And of course there is nothing renewable about natural gas.