November 21st, 2009.

Without coal, most cities would be in the dark. Coal is Pennsylvania’s source for electricity. Coal is Pennsylvania’s source for jobs… etc. We’re in coal country. We ate lunch in Coal Center, PA. We hung out with a coal miner much of the other day. We’ve passed power plants that are burning “clean” coal as I type this. And yet, I don’t understand the obsession.

*A very dissatisfied customer had this printed on the back of his Freightliner truck. The icons on the left are little “tows” and the icons on the right say “In the shop”. Wow.*

It’s a concept that’s easy to understand. Let’s take a classroom of 6-year olds. We’ll have a vat of pudding… because 6 year-olds like pudding… and we’ll have a lot of milk and pudding mix… and we’ll put half the class in charge of MAKING pudding, and half the class in charge of EATING pudding. Eventually, we’ll see that it’s faster to eat the stuff than it is to make it, and half the class will be whining for more. As well as very ill. Perhaps it’s a poor example. Perhaps we need to talk about the process of creating coal: of dying plant life, of compression, of the thousands and perhaps millions of years of carbon crystallization… and then the process of using it. Lighting it on fire and watching it dwindle and die.

Our audience at Tiffin University. They made a big fuss over us and at first I was worried that after moving ALL the tables on campus and absconding with every chair they could get their hands on that no-one would show up. By the time we’d started, however, the large Osceola Theatre in Tiffin, OH was filled.

It’s very simple. We use it faster than it’s made, and therefore, we’ll someday run out. QED. Is there more to the argument? “But it’s what we use!” But it will run out. “But it won’t run out for a hundred years!” But it will. And just as the class of 6 year-olds will eventually realize that they’ll have to eat something other than pudding at SOME point – so we’ve got to come to the realization that we’ll have to use some other resource. Putting it off till it’s a major problem is just stupid. It’ll be like a revolution – except we’ll need a whole lot more than guns and canned food. Suddenly our world will grind to a halt as we search in a panic. Let’s start now and perhaps gain some breathing room.

*Heather performing at Tiffin University. No pictures of ME of course. Heather didn’t break any strings!*

You don’t have to believe in global warming to think that pollution is bad. One doesn’t have to believe in saving endangered animals to believe that strip mining is not the best approach. You don’t even have to be an all-embracing left-wing liberal to understand that perhaps purchasing all of our energy from other governments that we don’t see eye-to-eye with is possibly not an excellent idea.