This morning's story in the Charleston Gazette by the indispensable award-winning environmental reporter Ken Ward Jr. says:
Gov. Joe Manchin said Tuesday that he opposes President-elect Barack Obama's plan to cap greenhouse gas emissions to try to curb global warming.
Manchin said he told Obama recently that he's "on a different page" regarding Obama's proposal for a carbon dioxide emission "cap-and-trade" program. The governor said he's concerned the federal government will impose such emissions on coal-fired power plants before utilities come up with workable plans to control those emissions.
Manchin spoke during the opening session of his second annual Energy Summit, a gathering of industry officials and boosters at Stonewall Resort. The governor repeated his pledge to next year introduce legislation to encourage more alternative energy production in West Virginia. But he did not provide details of his plans, and said that alternative fuels will not replace the nation's reliance on coal.
"Coal is the cornerstone fuel of the future," Manchin said. "Every economist and expert I talk to says we're going to use it, but in a different form."
I'm sure the Muslim-elect enjoys being patronized by the likes of Genius Joe the Cheerleader for Big Coal, especially since the gov presides over a fossil fuels-producing state where, as recently as a couple of weeks before the election, a poll by a Democratic Party firm, Orion Strategies, revealed that 20 percent of the state think Obama's a Muslim and another 34 percent believe he's a follower of some other, non-Christian religion.
Seems to me Genius Joe might be better off talkin' sweet to the New Boss about how the spending criteria'll be developed for the massive infrastructure/stimulus package that's coming down the pike than pompously spouting off about what he seems to suggest is consensus in the scientific community supporting his position on coal. (Especially since Senator Byrd's 91 now and no longer chairs Appropriations, and WV needs some of that stimulus package money, so long as it's for valid projects.)
(And as for Joe's [almost certainly overwhelmingly industry hoe] "experts," well, given his history one has to wonder if one of them isn't maybe pharmaceutical industry heavyweight Big Mike Puskar's valet, or something. But that's another story for another day; anyone who's interested can simply google the following: Bresch Heather Garrison Mike governor's daughter WVU degree scandal])
Maybe, just maybe, Governor Joe might instead want to be, say, diplomatically hinting that the governor of West Virginia is, like, you know...perfectly positioned to broker a mountaintop removal mining moratorium in return for major investments in clean coal technology?
Something the new prez and select bigshots from the coal states could bask in the reflected glory of?
Something that might even provoke the President-elect to reflect, "Hmmmm. Maybe this meatball's not totally useless after all..."
(As for the idea of a tradeoff between terminating the obscenity of mountaintop removal and investing in clean coal technologies, see this thorough kos piece from shortly after the election by Devilstower titled How to Save the Coal Industry. The political opening is there. And if the industry turns it down, then it means their clean-coal posture is nothing more than lipstick-on-a-pig BS, as these heavily in rotation, There's No Such Thing as "Clean" Coal ads from Reality.org allege.)