Jim Holbert, Kentucky District 5’s House candidate provided us with his campaign platform, five sets of well organized bullet points, and he had appended another little section just for EnergizeUS.
This is the sort of discipline we’ve come to expect from the military candidates we see and Jim’s background as an Army and Coast Guard pilot, used to performing a preflight checks, is clearly apparent.
It’s a pleasure to put together an introductory piece like this when given such well organized source material.
Kentucky District 5 might well be called the Eastern Kentucky Coal Field district. The district is entirely within the coal production area and it covers perhaps half of the 14,000 square miles of the field. The district can provide domestic fossil fuel as we transition away from imports and it can do so cleanly. Coal gassifiers in this area can store their emissions in the oil producing strata of the region. If truly clean coal is to be achieved anywhere it’ll happen in Kentucky 5 first - the conditions are right.
The district has coal lands that have been reclaimed after production. These areas are no longer natural, but they do provide habitat for wildlife, and they could provide habitat for wind turbines. The highly paid turbine maintainer jobs would be eagerly sought, the property taxes generated would be a boon to the counties, and clean electricity would flow for the lifetime of the turbine. Turbines lay lightly on the land; it’s possible that they could be coupled with sustainable forestry, permitting the manufacture of wood pellets for both local use and export to New England.
Coal won’t last forever and the wind doesn’t blow every day. There are places where pumped hydro storage would work to firm the wind turbines’ output, but Jim favors the idea of thorium cycle reactors. Thorium atoms are just a bit lighter than Uranium and they can be used to produce heat to drive a steam turbine, but they can not be made into nuclear weapons. Japanese manufacturers have designs down to the neighborhood size.
The district could produce some of its own biofuel locally but there is the typical chicken/egg problem with new things - there aren’t any E85 ethanol pumps. Jim wants to provide enough funds for one in each county as a stepping stone to broader adoption.
His talking points mention the National Coal Authority as being a vehicle for improving worker safety, reducing mining waste concerns, and otherwise improving process for coal production. I didn’t recognize this entity and Google was also strangely silent. Rather than digging into this now we’ll return to this at some future point when Jim can help us with some expanded reporting.
EnergizeUS is a coalition of candidates across the country talking about how we can reenergize our economy, put Americans back to work in good paying jobs and lessen our dependence on foreign oil but creating jobs in the areas of renewable energy resources and energy efficiency. Candidates of the coalition are: David Cozad (TX-06), Raul Grijalva (AZ-07),Jim Holbert (KY-05), Billy Kennedy (NC-5), David Gill (IL-15), Lance Enderle (MI-08), Rodney Glassman (AZ-Sen), Cheryl Hudspeth (KS-02),Lainey Melnick (TX-21), Kevin Bradley (CO-05),Jerry Policoff (PA St House 41), and Michael Puhr (IL St House 104).
You can learn more about the coalition at EnergizeUS.org & you can join the conversation on Twitter and Facebook.
If you can afford to, please show these candidates some love on ActBlue.