This Carbon Based Life

By David Glenn Cox

I see Mr. Trump is on his ketamine pony again trying to pedal us “clean coal” again. Travel by steamship! Take the California Sunset Limited! Everything is better by train! R.E.A. all the way! Trying to sell us a product whose time has clearly come and passed. It fits neatly with his tired, grumpy grandpa persona, who hates windmills, electric cars, and women reading the six o’clock news. What do you like, gramps? He likes the good old days. Buggy whips, taffy pulls, and ice cream socials, at least, that’s the way he chooses to remember it. We all do it! We idolize or idealize our own past. You can’t hang him for it.

But you can remove him from office for it if he persists in living in 1950. I have a personal connection to “clean coal.” My father was a mechanical and electrical engineer. Hired by the Carter Administration to lead a team of engineers looking for “clean energy!” Fast forward eighteen months and fifteen million dollars later of your beautiful tax money, and look what they’ve built! A gleaming new state-of-the-art energy research facility, seeking a better energy path for America. Then Ronald Reagan was elected, where clean energy was about as popular as genital warts. Reagan famously had solar panels unceremoniously removed from the roof of the White House.

This was the era of big oil. The Reagan plan was to shutter the facility completely and fire everyone involved. My father was nearing sixty. He’d only taken the job as one more big project, and government employment job security. He got neither, as his job was in and out of the budget every year thereafter. But their salvation came at the hands of the then, much more powerful than now, coal lobby. Sounds interesting? Free research at taxpayer’s expense? Tell us more! And thus, the clean energy facility was saved for now, only now, it had a new purpose.

Sure, sure, we’re still looking for clean energy, only now, we’re going to look for it inside coal. And being good engineers, in several years they had narrowed the process to create actual clean coal by removing most of the sulfur. The basic problem was the more sulfur you removed, the less heat the coal generated, nes Pax? It took more clean coal to generate the same amount of heat energy as dirty coal, and clean coal was twice as expensive. “Clean coal” was very possible, just not very practical.

The infrastructure that coal once enjoyed is now long gone. There was a rail line underneath Chicago for delivering coal. But I don’t think anyone is going to be switching back to coal. Get this natural gas monstrosity out of my basement; I’m going with a boiler and a coal bunker! I just have to remember to get up at three in the morning to throw in a few shovelfuls on the fire so there’s heat in the morning.

Coal’s legacy is too jaundiced and littered with bitter coal strikes and black lung disease to save it in a consumer economy. The Trump administration is trying to bring back cigarettes. No, no, no, not here. That would be wrong. But overseas is okay, isn’t it? We don’t care about Chinese air quality. (snicker, snicker.)

Mr. Trump uses his brand-new authority as a WARTIME president. Remember, how Mr. Trump said we weren’t at war or the war was already over? He lied. He’s giving away seven hundred million dollars to the sellers of “beautiful, clean coal.” Because in a time of war! Strategic industries must be rapidly expanded to meet the unexpected trials of war! So they are going to build a coal exporting facility in Oakland, California, a government funded, taxpayer expense to defend us! Wait? An exporting facility? How’s that supposed to defend us? Get back! Or I’ll export at you again!

China still burns coal, and Mr. Trump uses that as an excuse to say that we should burn coal too. If China jumped off the Great Wall of China, would you? But China’s native coal is even dirtier than our native coal. Hey, China? Wanna buy some “clean coal?” See? This is America; only the slogan has survived. A buzzword from a bygone era that doesn’t mean now what it meant back then. At the same time, the rest of the world is trying to pressure/encourage China to stop burning so much coal. While Mr. Trump is trying to sell them more coal, and the American taxpayer won’t be better off by a farthing for his seven hundred-million-dollar giveaway/investment. You might as well drop seven hundred million dollars through a paper shredder.

It’s maybe not illegal, but probably somewhere illegal. It’s in that dark area of the political universe known as near-crime. You have the new highway moved a mile or two to abut your own property. You decide where the new sewer line goes, and those real estate developers can be so friendly and generous sometimes. So prove buying buying the coal lobby an export terminal isn’t for national defense.

I think it is interesting how they chose Oakland. I’ll tell you why. I lived in Alabama for too long, not to smell that one. In Alabama, industrial jobs are at a premium. Alabama leads the nation in waste dump’s We’re number one! Don’t ask about the schools, though. But that has all the makings of an Alabama project. Desperate Oakland government probably couldn’t say no and thanked their lucky stars for the project.  We want to build the world’s biggest toxic waste dump, in your desperate county! Okay, I’ll get the map.

This love-hate relationship with China; one minute we’re taxing Chinese imports and the next, we’re giving away money to export coal to them. President Trump rails against the Chinese saying the Chinese are ripping us off, but he can’t wait to trade, trade some more. But this is clean coal, you’ll like it a lot. The US government subsidized this coal just for you. And just for you, we built, a brand new export facility to help you keep your costs down.

I wouldn’t say this is the worst crime in the Trump administration, just perhaps one of the most naked, crooked money grabs, so far. The writing is on the wall. The end of coal, clean or otherwise, as fuel is coming to an end. Now, imagine your generational family wealth is tied up in those coal fields. Thank God they still have a political lobby and a crooked president in office, or they would be financially ruined.

People always choose to talk about the winners, never the losers. Nobody remembers all the gaslight companies ruined by Thomas Edison’s light bulb. Or the tens of thousand of livery stables and quality blacksmiths put out of business by Henry Ford. Try to rent a horse in any major city in America, just try.

See, kid. This is way better than a Nintendo. It’s a hoop, and you use this stick to roll it with and you run alongside it. Sound like fun? Try it!

“Change is not merely necessary to life – it is life.”
― Alvin Toffler