Pirate's Cove

Let’s start off with noting that when people fail to live by the rules they want Everyone Else to live be, that’s a moral failure. An inexcusable one

Failing to act on climate change is an inexcusable moral failure

The responses of coal country business leaders and politicians to the Clean Power Plan recently announced by President Barack Obama and the Environmental Protection Agency demonstrate that there are no limits to their willingness to pursue coal industry profits without regard for the harmful consequences of their decisions and actions.

The coal industry has a long history of such irresponsible behavior. That’s why West Virginia has biologically degraded streams from perpetual acid mine drainage, fish that can’t be eaten because of too much mercury in their flesh, unstable toxic sludge impoundments looming over communities, and ecologically vital headwater streams buried under massive piles of rubble. It’s also why coal miners experience agonizing deaths from black lung disease, coalfield residents suffer elevated risks of contracting numerous chronic or lethal diseases, and miners are stripped of their hard-won pensions and health benefits.

Now, see, those are actual real world issues. Those are reasons why I am against coal, and want to see it’s usage replaced. I’ve noted time and time again that the Cult of Climastrology hijacks these real world issues and puts them under the banner of ‘climate change’.

Yet in opposing the Clean Power Plan, these business leaders and politicians are rising to unprecedented levels of cynicism and recklessness. While they have long shown a willingness to turn regions of the world into virtual sacrifice zones, their new message is that they don’t mind doing the same thing to the entire planet. The coal industry is a primary contributor to the increase in greenhouse gases that is destabilizing our global climate and global ecosystems. We are already experiencing impacts from this destabilization, such as more violent and extreme storms, floods, wildfires and droughts. If we continue on our present course, the best evidence indicates that the impacts from climate change will shift from severe to catastrophic. So in opposing the Clean Power Plan, the message from these business leaders and politicians is that they don’t mind inflicting significant harm on every single person on the planet to protect industry profits. Not only that, but they don’t care if continuing to burn fossil fuels for energy degrades the planet for every human that will live on Earth in the future and places the very survival of future generations at risk.

See? There we go. Idiots. When will Jim Waggy at the Charleston Gazette-Mail give up his own big carbon footprint?