Showing posts with label Energy and Environment. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Energy and Environment. Show all posts
Monday, September 10, 2012
UMWA: Stupid Is As Stupid Does
During his campaigning in 2008, Barack Obama promised, on several occasions, “I will bankrupt the coal industry “.
In spite of that promise, the president of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) Cecil E. Roberts announced on May 21, 2008 that his organization is endorsing Barack Obama for president. Roberts then added, “He understands and will fight for the needs our members have today and the hopes our members have for a secure future for themselves and their families.”
Obama has taken the steps needed to fulfill that promise. All coal burning power plants are scheduled for shutdown and the supporting mines are being shuttered.
Yet, in several recent appearances Roberts has addressed the issue as if it were a rogue EPA and not Obama that is responsible for the dismantling of the coal industry.
A couple of weeks ago it was announced that the United Mine Workers of America had decided not to endorse either Obama/Biden or Romney/Ryan.
Mike Caputo stated, “As of right now, we have elected to stay out of this election.” Then added,
“Our members right now have indicated to stay out of this race, and that’s why we’ve done that.... I don’t think, quite frankly, that coalfield folks are crazy about either candidate."
(Note: Mike Caputo is an UMWA official and a Democratic member of the West Virginia House of Delegates.)
Stay out of the race? Endorse no one? How stupid can they get?
Full disclosure:
The old WachDog grew up (at least my first 23 years) in the coalfields of WV. My Grandfather was a miner (WV and IL); my father was a mining engineer and superintendent, I spent four summers working at assorted mining jobs. And there are still many relatives and friends working in mines.
I was for a brief time a member of the UMWA. At that time, John L. Lewis, a devout communist, was the president. In the fifty years since, the UMWA has had a long history of ho-hum presidents. It would appear that Cecil E. Roberts is no exception!
The rank and file members are not stupid people. You cannot function in a modern mine without a considerable degree of intelligence. So why do these otherwise smart people blindly follow their idiot leadership down the road to oblivion? I could not answer that question in the 1950’s and I can’t answer it now. But I can tell you that if you have a choice between someone that you don't like because he is not a democrat and someone that is is devoted to wiping out your job, your community, and your families future, you want to make damn certain that the bastard is defeated.
To insure that Obama is defeated, you must support Romney!
The choice is yours, defy your union handlers and vote to save your job or spend the rest of your life dreaming of what might have been. -- WD
Comments are invited!
Send feedback to: WatchDog
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Friday, August 24, 2012
Obama’s War On Coal Can Be Stopped, Not Reversed
by Neil W. McCabe / Human Events
8/24/2012 06:15 AM
The founder and CEO of the nation’s 12th largest coal producer told Human Events in an exclusive interview that President Barack Obama’s war on coal has done permanent damage to America’s competitiveness.
“It can be stopped, but it cannot be reversed,” said Robert E. Murray, the CEO of Murray Energy, a privately-held coal producer based in Pepper Pike, Ohio.
Obama is planning to close 175 power plants by 2020, roughly equivalent to 83,000 megawatts, he said. Most of the plants will go off the grid by 2014.
The physical reality is that idle coal mines or coal-fired electric generating plants atrophy, he said.
“Those plants are not designed to remain idle,” he said. “The boilers and turbines are made to keep heat in them and they start deteriorating very rapidly.”
The same is also true for coal mines, he said.
“A coal mine is a living thing,” Murray said. “Once you stop the operation of a coal mine, they flood very quickly, and secondly, the roof conditions, even if you can keep it pumped out, slake.”
“The roof slakes, the roof spalls — these are mining terms,” he said. “As the moisture in the air goes underground from the hot air outside into the 58 degrees underground, the air currents just cut the roof down like a knife. The mine was a living thing. When it dies, you cannot bring it back.”
Romney understands that there is a whole segment of the American economy, and the American scheme of things, that is being destroyed, Murray said.
“I’ve been with Romney a number of times, and some of that was one-on-one,” he said. “I can’t betray a confidence, and never would, but I can tell you, he gets it.”
Murray said after working 31 years at a NYSE-traded coal company, he led a leveraged buyout of one of the company’s mines in 1988. Today, Murray Energy is the 12th largest producer of coal with 3,300 employees.
“My sons are fifth-generation coal miners and we were coal miners in Scotland and Wales before that,” he said.
“What has happened in the last three years is unprecedented in the history of the coal industry,” he said.
“Barack Obama and his appointees and his political supporters are destroying the United States’ coal industry deliberately,” Murray said.
When he was running for president, Obama vowed to bankrupt any new coal-fired plant with regulations, he said.
“While Joe Biden said he wanted ‘No coal in America,’” he said.
“They are making good to their promises to their radical constituencies on the Left Coast and California and in New England and elsewhere,” said the coal executive, who is a graduate from an advanced management program at the Harvard Business School and holds a bachelor’s in mine engineering from the Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio.
“Coal-fired electrical generation has historically been $0.04 per kilowatt hour,” he said. “Wind and solar power that Obama promotes is $.22 per kilowatt hour.”
“People who manufacture a product for the global market are not going to be able to compete,” he said.
Electricity from coal is cheap and reliable, he said.
“In 2011, there was major flooding in Ohio, and the power was not available, and the utility commission required American Electric Power, the country’s largest coal-fired producer of electricity, to stay connected to 3,800 megawatts of wind power on their system,” he said.
“When the floods were on, and they needed the power, he drew on his wind power and he had 18 megawatts — ‘cause the wind wasn’t blowing,” he said.
“We can not for economic reasons, for security reasons, continue this insanity,” he said.
“It is insanity to set forth on this future for a staple we need,” he said.
“China has been building a 500-megawatt coal-fired plant every week, for years,” he said.
“What’ll be happening is that they are going to have the low-cost electricity generation and it’s going to make the United States of America even less competitive in the global marketplace, because China will have the low-cost electricity,” he said. “We will end up exporting more jobs to China.”
At the last quarterly auction of a group of electric power companies from 13 Mid-Atlantic and Midwest states the prices for 2015 and 2016 were bid up to a price eight times what the power price was in 2011 and 2012, he said.
After the auction, utilities put out statements explaining why they bid the prices up so high, Murray said.
“There are going to be brownouts and blackouts because of the shortage of power and because they are required by the utility commissions to keep the lights on, the heat on, so they bid it up because Obama is closing all of these coal-fired $.04-a-kilowatt power plants,” he said.
There is also a human dimension to the coal business, because so many families depend on the jobs provided by coal, he said.
At one event in Wheeling, W.Va., organized by Murray, presumptive Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney spent an evening with 800 of his workers and their families, he said. “Afterwards, Romney looked out at the people there and said to me privately: ‘I’ll remember this night forever.’”
Murray, who as a young miner was once trapped in a dark mine for 12 hours, said he has one unionized mine, the first one he bought.
“I have dealt with the unions all my life and I understand them very well.”
Murray said union members through the years have threatened him and his family with harm. “My life has been threatened by them repeatedly during the 55 years that I have been active in the coal industry.”
“I say to my union employees: ‘Why do you let the United Mine Workers take $2,500 a year in dues from you and put it on a guy that is eliminating your job?’” he said. “They just hang their heads.”
“I know these men, they get intimidated by the United Mine Workers and they are afraid to vote them out,” he said.
It is more than just his workers’ jobs that are at risk, he said.
Studies of the economic impact of the coal industry show that because of its place in the food chain, it has a tremendous multiplier effect, he said.
“It’s up to 11 to 1, and that’s to provide the goods and services to our people that our mines require, so with that multiplier, our company accounts for some 40,000 jobs,” he said.
“If these people, who I know by name, lose their homes, they have no one to sell them too.”
“What happens is that these people that I know by name, who just want to work in honor and dignity, are denied that right,” he said.
“These people then go from the positive to the negative side of the ledger, permanently for the rest of their lives — and this is not the America I cherish,” he said.
“I grew up very poor,” he said. “My dad was paralyzed in a mining accident when I was nine-years-old, I supported my mother and my dad from the time I was 16.”
“Obama is eliminating jobs by the tens of thousands in areas where there is nothing else for these people to do,” Murray said.
“You give a 52-year-old man, who’s never had a decent job after working for 30 years, you give that man a job and he just starts bawling in your office,” he said.
“Obama has never had a job, he’s never created a job, he’s never seen that,” he said. “I see it every day.”
Murray said the president and federal regulators target his company.
“I can’t get permits that other coal companies get,” he said. “I get scrutiny from the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Labor, Mine and Safety Administration and the Department of the Interior’s office of coal mining that other companies don’t get.”
“I have a target on my back,” he said. I’ve been doing this for 55 years and it’s unbelievable that it is happening in the United States of America,” he said.
“When Obama and his appointees push on Bob Murray, I push back harder — but, I get frightened,” he said. “I am frightened at the moment because of what they do.”
But, he will continue to push back, he said.
“Why? Because, I know the names of those thirty-three hundred people, “Murray said. “Everything that they have is going to be destroyed.”
Comments are invited!
Send feedback to: WatchDog
.
8/24/2012 06:15 AM
The founder and CEO of the nation’s 12th largest coal producer told Human Events in an exclusive interview that President Barack Obama’s war on coal has done permanent damage to America’s competitiveness.
“It can be stopped, but it cannot be reversed,” said Robert E. Murray, the CEO of Murray Energy, a privately-held coal producer based in Pepper Pike, Ohio.
Obama is planning to close 175 power plants by 2020, roughly equivalent to 83,000 megawatts, he said. Most of the plants will go off the grid by 2014.
The physical reality is that idle coal mines or coal-fired electric generating plants atrophy, he said.
“Those plants are not designed to remain idle,” he said. “The boilers and turbines are made to keep heat in them and they start deteriorating very rapidly.”
The same is also true for coal mines, he said.
“A coal mine is a living thing,” Murray said. “Once you stop the operation of a coal mine, they flood very quickly, and secondly, the roof conditions, even if you can keep it pumped out, slake.”
“The roof slakes, the roof spalls — these are mining terms,” he said. “As the moisture in the air goes underground from the hot air outside into the 58 degrees underground, the air currents just cut the roof down like a knife. The mine was a living thing. When it dies, you cannot bring it back.”
Romney understands that there is a whole segment of the American economy, and the American scheme of things, that is being destroyed, Murray said.
“I’ve been with Romney a number of times, and some of that was one-on-one,” he said. “I can’t betray a confidence, and never would, but I can tell you, he gets it.”
Murray said after working 31 years at a NYSE-traded coal company, he led a leveraged buyout of one of the company’s mines in 1988. Today, Murray Energy is the 12th largest producer of coal with 3,300 employees.
“My sons are fifth-generation coal miners and we were coal miners in Scotland and Wales before that,” he said.
“What has happened in the last three years is unprecedented in the history of the coal industry,” he said.
“Barack Obama and his appointees and his political supporters are destroying the United States’ coal industry deliberately,” Murray said.
When he was running for president, Obama vowed to bankrupt any new coal-fired plant with regulations, he said.
“While Joe Biden said he wanted ‘No coal in America,’” he said.
“They are making good to their promises to their radical constituencies on the Left Coast and California and in New England and elsewhere,” said the coal executive, who is a graduate from an advanced management program at the Harvard Business School and holds a bachelor’s in mine engineering from the Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio.
“Coal-fired electrical generation has historically been $0.04 per kilowatt hour,” he said. “Wind and solar power that Obama promotes is $.22 per kilowatt hour.”
“People who manufacture a product for the global market are not going to be able to compete,” he said.
Electricity from coal is cheap and reliable, he said.
“In 2011, there was major flooding in Ohio, and the power was not available, and the utility commission required American Electric Power, the country’s largest coal-fired producer of electricity, to stay connected to 3,800 megawatts of wind power on their system,” he said.
“When the floods were on, and they needed the power, he drew on his wind power and he had 18 megawatts — ‘cause the wind wasn’t blowing,” he said.
“We can not for economic reasons, for security reasons, continue this insanity,” he said.
“It is insanity to set forth on this future for a staple we need,” he said.
“China has been building a 500-megawatt coal-fired plant every week, for years,” he said.
“What’ll be happening is that they are going to have the low-cost electricity generation and it’s going to make the United States of America even less competitive in the global marketplace, because China will have the low-cost electricity,” he said. “We will end up exporting more jobs to China.”
At the last quarterly auction of a group of electric power companies from 13 Mid-Atlantic and Midwest states the prices for 2015 and 2016 were bid up to a price eight times what the power price was in 2011 and 2012, he said.
After the auction, utilities put out statements explaining why they bid the prices up so high, Murray said.
“There are going to be brownouts and blackouts because of the shortage of power and because they are required by the utility commissions to keep the lights on, the heat on, so they bid it up because Obama is closing all of these coal-fired $.04-a-kilowatt power plants,” he said.
There is also a human dimension to the coal business, because so many families depend on the jobs provided by coal, he said.
At one event in Wheeling, W.Va., organized by Murray, presumptive Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney spent an evening with 800 of his workers and their families, he said. “Afterwards, Romney looked out at the people there and said to me privately: ‘I’ll remember this night forever.’”
Murray, who as a young miner was once trapped in a dark mine for 12 hours, said he has one unionized mine, the first one he bought.
“I have dealt with the unions all my life and I understand them very well.”
Murray said union members through the years have threatened him and his family with harm. “My life has been threatened by them repeatedly during the 55 years that I have been active in the coal industry.”
“I say to my union employees: ‘Why do you let the United Mine Workers take $2,500 a year in dues from you and put it on a guy that is eliminating your job?’” he said. “They just hang their heads.”
“I know these men, they get intimidated by the United Mine Workers and they are afraid to vote them out,” he said.
It is more than just his workers’ jobs that are at risk, he said.
Studies of the economic impact of the coal industry show that because of its place in the food chain, it has a tremendous multiplier effect, he said.
“It’s up to 11 to 1, and that’s to provide the goods and services to our people that our mines require, so with that multiplier, our company accounts for some 40,000 jobs,” he said.
“If these people, who I know by name, lose their homes, they have no one to sell them too.”
“What happens is that these people that I know by name, who just want to work in honor and dignity, are denied that right,” he said.
“These people then go from the positive to the negative side of the ledger, permanently for the rest of their lives — and this is not the America I cherish,” he said.
“I grew up very poor,” he said. “My dad was paralyzed in a mining accident when I was nine-years-old, I supported my mother and my dad from the time I was 16.”
“Obama is eliminating jobs by the tens of thousands in areas where there is nothing else for these people to do,” Murray said.
“You give a 52-year-old man, who’s never had a decent job after working for 30 years, you give that man a job and he just starts bawling in your office,” he said.
“Obama has never had a job, he’s never created a job, he’s never seen that,” he said. “I see it every day.”
Murray said the president and federal regulators target his company.
“I can’t get permits that other coal companies get,” he said. “I get scrutiny from the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Labor, Mine and Safety Administration and the Department of the Interior’s office of coal mining that other companies don’t get.”
“I have a target on my back,” he said. I’ve been doing this for 55 years and it’s unbelievable that it is happening in the United States of America,” he said.
“When Obama and his appointees push on Bob Murray, I push back harder — but, I get frightened,” he said. “I am frightened at the moment because of what they do.”
But, he will continue to push back, he said.
“Why? Because, I know the names of those thirty-three hundred people, “Murray said. “Everything that they have is going to be destroyed.”
Comments are invited!
Send feedback to: WatchDog
.
Sunday, July 22, 2012
Questions To Ask Democrats As They Abandon Barack
By Austin Hill
Democrats are abandoning Barack Obama’s ship.
Last week Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi instructed Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives to not attend this September’s Democratic National Convention. Instead, Ms. Pelosi insisted, their time would be better spent campaigning at home, rather than partying in Charlotte, N.C.
Ms. Pelosi’s announcement falls in line with the AFL-CIO, which announced the previous week that it won’t be spending money to bankroll the convention. And Pelosi and her Big Labor friends are in lockstep with Democrat U.S. Senators Jon Tester of Montana, Claire McCaskill of Missouri, and Joe Manchin of West Virginia – all of whom have chosen to avoid Barack Obama’s nomination for a second term.
After three and a half years of Barack Obama radicalizing their party, it now appears that some very powerful Democrats have had a startling realization: the Obama agenda is both dysfunctional and destructive, and has become politically lethal – Americans see that it bares little resemblance to America’s time-honored history and heritage, and they have begun to reject it outright.
Democrat candidates at all levels of government will go about campaigning over these next few months, making promises based upon their party platform without mentioning President Obama’s name. But as they talk about the following agenda items – all of which appear in the “issues” section of Democrats.Org, the national party’s web home – consider asking the candidates the accompanying questions below.
Let’s start with the issue of “energy independence.” Democrats tell us that “President Obama knows we can’t just drill our way to lower gas prices,” and that their party is focused on “developing all of America’s natural resources...” The President himself has said that he is committed to an “all of the above” approach to energy policy, implying that he’s okay with petroleum-based energy, along with the alternative energy development that he’s promoted.
This sounds great- but consider asking Democrats this question: “If President Obama is committed to an ‘all of the above’ strategy, why did he reject the Keystone XL pipeline project that would have produced employment opportunities from the Canadian border all the way to Texas?” In reality, an “all of the above” approach to energy policy means “anything except Big Oil” within the Obama worldview – but Democrats would prefer to ignore this.
Your Democrat candidate may prefer, instead, to tell you about their party’s agenda for “green energy.” On this point, you may wish to ask “how do you feel about CBS News reporting that the Obama Administration has lost $6.5 billion of our money already on what they described as ‘risky green energy ventures?’ Did CBS lie to us?”
You may also hear from your Democrat candidate that the party is fighting for “civil rights” on behalf of LGBT couples –which is to say that they’re working for legal sanctioning of same-sex marriage. Mention to them that Democrats in the California legislature are now working on a bill to expand parental rights to more than two parents per child. Under the California plan, any individual child could have three or perhaps more, legally identified mommies and daddies. Then ask the Democrat, “Why would you limit the structuring of marriages and families to only two adults? Given how President Obama’s position on this issue has evolved, and given the highly evolved position among California Democrats, aren’t you being a bit exclusionary and narrow-minded, trying to limit a marriage or a family to only two adults?”
Concerns about the economy are top of mind for us all, which puts Democrats in an awkward situation. Still, your Democrat candidate will likely remind you that President Obama inherited a bad economy and is now working to “creating jobs.” To this you may wish to simply ask “how is a job created?” Then listen carefully to the response. It will likely be highly amusing.
There are so many other questions to ask of your local Democrat candidate, regardless of the issues the candidate raises. “Why does the so-called ‘healthcare reform law’ expand the force and power of the I.R.S.?” “Why are illegal aliens exempt from the Obamacare tax?” “Is it purely coincidental that the executives of the ‘green energy’ companies that were recipients of President Obama’s grants and loans were also donors to his previous presidential campaign?” “Why has President Obama abandoned the work requirements imposed on welfare recipients by President Bill Clinton?” “Why is 80% of the Department of Agriculture’s budget spent on food stamps, while less than 20% of it is devoted to the farming industry?” “Why is the Obama Administration ‘collaborating’ with the government of Mexico to give American food stamps to illegal aliens?” Your local Democrat will probably not want to hear these questions, and may have to admit that they disagree with parts of the President’s agenda.
You might even hear your local Democrat say that they’re abandoning the President’s agenda for America altogether – just like so many of them have abandoned the President’s convention in September.
Comments are invited!
Send feedback to: WatchDog
.
Democrats are abandoning Barack Obama’s ship.
Last week Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi instructed Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives to not attend this September’s Democratic National Convention. Instead, Ms. Pelosi insisted, their time would be better spent campaigning at home, rather than partying in Charlotte, N.C.
Ms. Pelosi’s announcement falls in line with the AFL-CIO, which announced the previous week that it won’t be spending money to bankroll the convention. And Pelosi and her Big Labor friends are in lockstep with Democrat U.S. Senators Jon Tester of Montana, Claire McCaskill of Missouri, and Joe Manchin of West Virginia – all of whom have chosen to avoid Barack Obama’s nomination for a second term.
After three and a half years of Barack Obama radicalizing their party, it now appears that some very powerful Democrats have had a startling realization: the Obama agenda is both dysfunctional and destructive, and has become politically lethal – Americans see that it bares little resemblance to America’s time-honored history and heritage, and they have begun to reject it outright.
Democrat candidates at all levels of government will go about campaigning over these next few months, making promises based upon their party platform without mentioning President Obama’s name. But as they talk about the following agenda items – all of which appear in the “issues” section of Democrats.Org, the national party’s web home – consider asking the candidates the accompanying questions below.
Let’s start with the issue of “energy independence.” Democrats tell us that “President Obama knows we can’t just drill our way to lower gas prices,” and that their party is focused on “developing all of America’s natural resources...” The President himself has said that he is committed to an “all of the above” approach to energy policy, implying that he’s okay with petroleum-based energy, along with the alternative energy development that he’s promoted.
This sounds great- but consider asking Democrats this question: “If President Obama is committed to an ‘all of the above’ strategy, why did he reject the Keystone XL pipeline project that would have produced employment opportunities from the Canadian border all the way to Texas?” In reality, an “all of the above” approach to energy policy means “anything except Big Oil” within the Obama worldview – but Democrats would prefer to ignore this.
Your Democrat candidate may prefer, instead, to tell you about their party’s agenda for “green energy.” On this point, you may wish to ask “how do you feel about CBS News reporting that the Obama Administration has lost $6.5 billion of our money already on what they described as ‘risky green energy ventures?’ Did CBS lie to us?”
You may also hear from your Democrat candidate that the party is fighting for “civil rights” on behalf of LGBT couples –which is to say that they’re working for legal sanctioning of same-sex marriage. Mention to them that Democrats in the California legislature are now working on a bill to expand parental rights to more than two parents per child. Under the California plan, any individual child could have three or perhaps more, legally identified mommies and daddies. Then ask the Democrat, “Why would you limit the structuring of marriages and families to only two adults? Given how President Obama’s position on this issue has evolved, and given the highly evolved position among California Democrats, aren’t you being a bit exclusionary and narrow-minded, trying to limit a marriage or a family to only two adults?”
Concerns about the economy are top of mind for us all, which puts Democrats in an awkward situation. Still, your Democrat candidate will likely remind you that President Obama inherited a bad economy and is now working to “creating jobs.” To this you may wish to simply ask “how is a job created?” Then listen carefully to the response. It will likely be highly amusing.
There are so many other questions to ask of your local Democrat candidate, regardless of the issues the candidate raises. “Why does the so-called ‘healthcare reform law’ expand the force and power of the I.R.S.?” “Why are illegal aliens exempt from the Obamacare tax?” “Is it purely coincidental that the executives of the ‘green energy’ companies that were recipients of President Obama’s grants and loans were also donors to his previous presidential campaign?” “Why has President Obama abandoned the work requirements imposed on welfare recipients by President Bill Clinton?” “Why is 80% of the Department of Agriculture’s budget spent on food stamps, while less than 20% of it is devoted to the farming industry?” “Why is the Obama Administration ‘collaborating’ with the government of Mexico to give American food stamps to illegal aliens?” Your local Democrat will probably not want to hear these questions, and may have to admit that they disagree with parts of the President’s agenda.
You might even hear your local Democrat say that they’re abandoning the President’s agenda for America altogether – just like so many of them have abandoned the President’s convention in September.
Comments are invited!
Send feedback to: WatchDog
.
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