We've been hearing that our representatives have been jumping with Lobbying Firms and other representatives pushing tax payer subsidies for the Coal Industry. They're hoping while Oil prices are high, we'll drop our drawers and just overlook the important factors, like MOVING AWAY FROM CARBON FUELS, let a lone, not funding these private businesses.
I guess we're supposed to ignore the warning signs and just kill ourselves so these Corporations and their supported officials can get richer. To heck with the environment. To heck with tax dollars working for the people and our country.
Who are the ones that need educated here?
I already called my Representative and Senator when I first heard about this latest push when I heard Dick Gephardt was at the front of this effort in this article.
Lawmakers Push for Big Subsidies for Coal Process
"Richard A. Gephardt, a former Democratic House majority leader, has been hired by Peabody Energy to help make the case for liquefied coal."
http://www.nytimes.com/...
And now this news comes to us that besides Senator Byrd, and Mitch McConnel pushing the coal businesss and subsidies, Obama has joined.
I guess that shouldn't be a surprise considering Obama admitted last year, even after knowing what Bush's Clear Skies Initiative brought us, he would have supported it if the Coal Industry in Illinois benefited.
"Act, yet the administration claimed it would help the coal industry, a major economic force in southern Illinois. In the end, he opposed it because he decided it would have been more beneficial to western coal producers, not those in Illinois. And what if he had determined that the Clear Skies Initiative would have aided Illinois coal? I asked. In that case, Obama said, "It would have been more difficult for me. . . . If I thought that it would have significantly helped Illinois coal but would have been a net minus for the environment, then you’ve got your classic legislative dilemma."
http://www.harpers.org/...
From I.G. Farben to Barack Obama
The Long Con on Synthetic Fuels
By JAMES RIDGEWAY
Global warming is well on its way to being a godsend for the coal industry. Lobbyists are busily trying to turn dirty coal into a pleasing green alternative promoted by such Democratic luminaries as Presidential hopeful Barack Obama and former House Speaker turned lobbyist Dick Gephardt. In the background, always ready to help, is veteran infighter former Senate Majority leader West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd.
Members of Congress are falling all over themselves writing legislation that would pump millions of taxpayer dollars into schemes that promise to turn coal into synthetic gas, develop oil shale, and the most popular at the moment, plans to transform coal into a liquid oil.
If any of this were to happen, huge hunks of the fragile western plains would be transformed into modern mining camps, wrecking fragile ecosystems, exhausting and polluting water supplies. Manufacture of synthetic fuels would subject workers, and the general nearby populations to cancer causing chemicals.
http://www.counterpunch.org/...
How are we ever going to get out of this huge hole we have been placed in, when our elected officials keep removing more ground at the bottom of that hole?