The U.S. Department of Energy – Hard At Work
Robert Murray of Murray Energy, right, hugging Energy Secretary Rick Perry
Here’s a video that’s illustrative of a couple of important operating principles in the U.S. government:
1) Our laws are made almost exclusively at the behest of Corporate America
and
2) This is supposed to be a secret.
It’s the story of how the official photographer for the U.S. Department of Energy was fired after leaking the photo shown above, featuring an embrace between Robert Murray, coal kingpin, and Rick Perry, Energy Secretary. This took place at the conclusion of a meeting in which Murray laid out his wish-list by which the coal industry should be regulated (which was then copied almost verbatim in the proposal that Perry later made to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission).
Craig,
(Yawn) Usual tiresome leftist moan, oh boo hoo, nobody cares about Obama’s ” War against Coal” anymore and now the elected government is pursuing it’s mandate by keeping election promises !
I realize that’s probably shocking for those who support politicians who make largely only token or ‘symbolic’ gestures towards keeping election promises, but that’s what’s happening here !
The policies of the majority of elected representatives acting in the benefit of many millions of Americans and the US economy. You might not like it when your ideas or political platform falls out of favour, but you must accept defeat with good grace and stop whining.
You are certainly free to express your opinion and ideas, but endless repetition of the same old mantra, is only counter-productive to your cause.
Eventually, over many, many decades the coal industry will cease to exist, but in the meantime it’s 44 % of the world power generation, (especially developing nations) and still more than 32% of US power generation, including reliable generation for heavy industry.
Endless whining about something which is impossible to end in the foreseeable future is tedious and only alienates those involved in the Coal industry.
It’s also very annoying to thousands of diligent, and practical, environmentalists working on reducing the negative effects of the coal industry and turning those negatives into positive environmental benefits.
@Marcopolo.
44% – this is a gross underestimate.
Don’t be beguiled by generation plant (any type) technology name plate values verses (generated + end use consumed) real world power production based on instrumentation values. They are very different!
A good example might be this 30 KW (name plate value) solar PV plant in rural Qld (Inglewood) connected to the local Ergon Energy Network that I am surveying. It is not working, and for a variety of reasons has never worked. But the 30 KW is locked and loaded and registered of course on the ‘global compiled PV generation plant’ register.
I have been privy to many astonishing sights on this subject.
On several occasions, Gigawatts of solar PV (held in interim storage and forecast for connection to something one day somewhere) but being on a generation entities inventory as ‘a registerable solar PV generation plant’ based on nameplate values only rather than actual power production values.
Don’t get me started on wind generator turbines ‘in waiting to produce pending …… mode’ but still registered as producing power.
Can’t do this sort of stuff with a coal generation plant. What they generate, is what’s registered. And you would be familiar with the term synchronous generation which defines how they produce their power. Its actually real power. Not name plate power.
That’s about enough from me.