You Can't Eat Coal

An Opinion by Walker Maintenance Man Roger Lilly

You can’t eat coal. Trust me on this one.
As a child, I tried with an idea that it would give me a quick burst of energy. I was wrong.
And coal can’t cook. You can put an apron on a large lump, sit it in the middle of the kitchen in the morning and come home that evening to no supper.
But, make no mistake about it, coal feeds my family.
Like tens of thousands of my fellow West Virginians, coal allows me to collect a paycheck. In my case it’s indirectly, but without the contracts coal companies have with my employer, I wouldn’t be working.
Now, with anti-coal hysteria at a fever pitch, I don’t know if I’ll be a contributor or a drain to the tax system next week, much less next month or next year. I do know that I can no longer be silent.
Suppose we grant so many people’s wishes and eliminate coal tomorrow. What are the alternatives? There’s oil. Can everyone say Exxon Valdez, a stranglehold on America’s economy and security, 90+ dollars a barrel and bestowing untold wealth on terrorist nations? That certainly sounds attractive.
Of course there’s ethanol and biofuels. Forget the fact that it uses more energy to manufacture ethanol than the fuel produces not to mention the water resources it consumes and the unlimited farmland it requires. I guess we could always cut down more rainforest.
There’s nuclear power. We might get to the point where we can forget about Three Mile Island and Chernobyl but it’s hard to escape the toxic waste that will plague our children’s children’s children for untold generations. I can already hear the same coal protesters screaming, ‘Not in my backyard’.
This brings us to everyone’s darling so-called clean energy.
Has anyone thought about how many wind turbines it would take to operate one factory or chemical plant? Even if they could be made to be non-lethal to birds and bats and attractive enough to meet everyone’s approval, what happens when we buffer the wind to such a great extent? Will we then affect the climate even more adversely?
We can’t expect to draw energy from the breeze without slowing it down. Likewise, we can’t extract huge amounts of energy from the sun or the earth’s core without regard for the unknown consequences.
I won’t deny global warming. But I will debate its cause.
Scientists often wear blinders, declaring that their theory is the only one plausible or possible, Chicken Little has screamed ‘greenhouse gases’ long and loud and to the exclusion of everything else. We’re betting the life of this planet that they’re right.
But what if they’re wrong? What if global warming is caused by something as simple as….heat?
Forget the fact that the world is being paved at an alarming rate and that blacktop and concrete throw warm air into the atmosphere in unbelievable volumes. Let’s concentrate, for now, on air conditioning.
AC is not a magic box that produces cool air from nothing and blows it into the room. It is, quite simply, a heat exchanger. For each degree a cubic foot of air is cooled inside, a degree is added to a cubic foot of air outside. You may think that’s small potatoes when it comes to your house, but consider the millions of residences making potatoes.
Now add in the skyscrapers, factories, arenas, auditoriums, theaters, coliseums and even some football fields that are air conditioned. I’ve worked on and around some of these massive heat exchangers and the amount of hot air expelled is indescribable. Tell me for a fact that this isn’t a major part of the problem.
Some of us walk from our air conditioned offices to drive our air conditioned cars to our air conditioned homes and still complain about the heat for the short time we’re exposed to it.
But heaven forbid I suggest that you give up a small bit of your comfort. It is so much easier for me to lose my job so that you can still have a clear conscious while you sleep at night under the cool breeze of your AC.