Comments on: Stop The Coal Train

By: george shea

george shea — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 05:50:45 +0000

Why don’t they just BLOCK THE COAL TRAINS?
A thousand or a hundred people standing on the
United Pacific or CSX tracks and blocking the path of
a huge coal train would be a great civil disobedience
event. Why not? There are thousands of miles of
railroad track in the U.S. & it’s highly vulnerable
to civil disobedience actions.

By: Benji

Benji — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 00:30:17 +0000

I just stopped by to say THANK YOU for covering mountaintop removal coal mining and the work of iLoveMountains.org.

Spreading the word as you are doing is EXACTLY what has made http://www.iLoveMountains.org a smashing success on the net.

If you ever have questions for future blog posts, feel free to contact me! Take care.

Benji@iLoveMountains.org
828 262 1500

By: Michael Pyne

Michael Pyne — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 01:59:38 +0000

Having done a lot of lurking around various political websites I think much of the problem is that although there is a lot of focus on alternative energy generation means like solar and wind among progressives, the various baseload generation methods seem to come down to oil, coal, and nuclear. And no progressive seems to want to support nuclear, and oil is too expensive. So when the coal lobby tries to come out with “clean” coal there ends up being support for the familiar coal generation method in order to marginalize nuclear.

The progressive community has been slowly warming up to nuclear (that is, when alternative generation methods are not possible or are uneconomic) but until people decide that coal is worse than nuclear you may continue to standby and watch CO2 emissions go up. The irony is that coal plants emit way more radioactivity than nuclear plants thanks to the radioactive isotopes contained in the coal ore which is burned.

By: greg

greg — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 21:12:34 +0000

@Michael Croes – Actually there is a record sized ozone hole this year. So that means here in NZ we with live with increased sunburn and skin cancer caused by other countries CFC emissions.

However fortunately in 1990 the world agreed to the Montreal protocol to phase out the use of CFC’s. Due to this international commitment the rate of growth of the ozone hole has slowed – nearly stopped – but it’s still there bigger than ever.

Anyways the same think tanks and ‘scientists’ who are shouting that global warming is a lie, were shouting CFC’s aren’t the cause back then.

We should learn from our ozone mistakes – global warming has the potential to be far worse – let’s deal with it at an international level.

@Eitan – Thanks for writing this, it’s really important to discuss this stuff. Here in NZ even though we have got 60-70% renewable electricity, we still have a coal lobby pushing for CCS and coal to diesel.

My opinion – the world just needs to say no to coal, plan an exit strategy and move on. There’s got to be some other meaningful jobs for people in the coal industry – it’s mostly capital intensive rather than labor anyways.

Cheers,
Greg.

By: Michael Croes

Michael Croes — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 20:53:27 +0000

@Eitan: I should have reacted to more of your post, so I will now… I do agree fossil fuels are bad in some ways. I think the worst thing about fossil fuels is how they’re acquired, I don’t really oppose to the use of fossil fuels because they’re thought to be harmful to the environment. And of course it’s definately not renewable. So I do think point 2, 3 and 4 are valid, point 1 is perhaps half valid (the 80% being the only point to discuss). Personally I’d like to see more nuclear energy. Only thing you get from that is nuclear waste, but it provides a lot of energy.

By: marku

marku — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 20:53:01 +0000

what has this todo with the gnome desktop? besides all this silly algore nonsense yesterday on discovery channel they were talking about possible mini-ice-age.

By: Eitan

Eitan — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 20:14:33 +0000

Sebastián,
Please try to keep the discussion civil, no need for name calling.

Michael,
There has been enough debate about that, and I don’t want to take us back to 2005. Besides global warming, there are about 99 other reasons why fossil fuels are a bad idea. I hope you read the post past the buzzword.

By: Sebastián Benítez

Sebastián Benítez — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 19:59:53 +0000

@Michael Croes: are you plain stupid or you live in another world? Or perhaps you just don’t care about anything, or have an agenda? Global warming is real. It’s been real for decades, and you can feel it even more as years pass by. Here in my country it’s hotter than ever before. Explain that, monkey.

By: Michael Croes

Michael Croes — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 19:35:06 +0000

Oh come on, global warming is the buzzword of this millenium… Remember how years ago it was the hole in the ozone layer, and when it closed up all by itself they had to find something new to talk about. There’s just as much proof contradicting global warming as there is proof claiming global warming, so any sane person should pay no attention to it…