The canary bird in the coal mine theory of the arts: artists should be treasured as alarm systems.
And turkeys are a bird. A very nervous bird. You'd be nervous too if you knew that one day you'd get your head cut off and... filled with stuffing.
We're not saying that you don't need coal, but when you do mine the coal there are responsibilities to it. It may cost a little more, but it is the right thing to do.
The end of coal in Appalachia doesn't mean that America is running out of coal (there's plenty left in Wyoming). But it should end the fantasy that coal can be an engine of job creation - the big open pit mines in Wyoming employ a tiny fraction of the number of people in an underground mine in Appalachia.
Well, I'll tell you, one of things I'm proud of is for someone from Southern California, who didn't grow up around coal mines, I learned a lot that tragic day we lost twenty-nine miners at Upper Big Branch coal mine.
I grew up listening to my dad, a miner who rose through the ranks to be the mine superintendent in Coalwood, W.V. , yelling orders into his black company phone. He wanted to get coal out of the ground and into coal cars and on its way to steel mills.
Writing is hard for every last one of us—straight white men included. Coal mining is harder. Do you think miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine for coal? They do not. They simply dig.
Capricornia there is a particular regional particularity and that is the Adani mine. We know that Adani, the massive Indian coal company, wants to develop the Carmichael mine... And people in Rockhampton know that and they know that the Greens are doing everything they possibly can to prevent the development of the Adani mine.
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.
Tiger Woods, Larry Bird, Wayne Gretzky, a pitcher just before a game, I would imagine they all have nervous energy. But as you perform, the nervous energy dissipates and you start to relax and you start to do what you do best.
The climate-change industrial complex pontificates that the U.S. has to stop using coal to save the planet. But even if the U.S. cut our own coal production to zero, China and India are building hundreds of coal plants. By suspending American coal production, we are merely transferring jobs out of the U.S.
Coal ash, the hazardous byproduct of burning coal to produce power, is a particularly insidious legacy of the nation's dependence on coal.
It seems the EPA has worked hard to devise new regulations that are designed to eliminate coal mining, coal burning, usage of coal.
Clean coal represents a breakthrough in the marketing of coal, but not in the science of burning coal.
The relevant questions now are: How do we move beyond coal? How do we bring new jobs to the coal fields and retrain coal miners for other work? How do we inspire entrepreneurialism and self-reliance in people whose lives have been dependent on the paternalistic coal industry?
Here in Indiana and in many states throughout the union, we rely on coal to power our homes and provide good-paying middle class jobs - like the one my family relied on when I was a kid. The coal mine helped put food on our table and helped me pursue an education and realize the American Dream.