There was no 'war on coal,' but there should be. Just not on the backs of miners. Delay is denial

Coal is a disaster for the climate and, although it provides good-paying jobs in areas where there often are no others, it also is a disaster for coal communities and miners themselves. For those reasons, with his last election campaign a success, President Obama should push hard to get regulations in place that work to force an end to most coal mining'a ban on mountain-top removal, regulations that control CO₂ emissions of existing plants, more funding for enforcing health and safety regulations while coal is still mined, installing every obstacle the executive branch can come up in the path of soaring U.S. coal exports and negotiating a no-exports pact with the world's other leading exporters (Russia, Australia, Indonesia). He should also find various innovative means to support and invest in the future of coal miners and other coal-company employees who will lose their livelihood as coal production is cut back.

Undoubtedly, Congress and the fossil fuel industry alike will try to block such moves in every way they can. But that should not stop the president from trying in every way he can find to act.

Over the past 30 years, we've been through several overlapping phases of denial since the menace of global warming first breached the science labs and journals and made it into the general public's view, most notably when James Hansen testified at a Senate hearing in 1988. By then he'd been studying the subject for more than a decade.

As first, deniers went so far as to claim that the greenhouse effect itself could not alter the chemistry of something as large as the earth's atmosphere. Then they said it could, but that it wasn't happening. That phase of denial lasted a long time. No surprise since it was heavily funded by Exxon and the Koch brothers and other self-interested parties. Shills such as Fred Singer took their money and spread their agenda. Not only was global warming not real, they said, but scientists who said it was already happening were labeled quacks with an agenda. They smeared them, called them liars, said they were just out for grant money and got the likes of Sen. Jim Inhofe and the brilliant climatologist Rush Limbaugh to ridicule them whenever a heavy snow fell somewhere. As recently as eight years ago, they were claiming that the ice of Greenland and the Arctic Ocean were not retreating.

Eventually, the deniers began tempering their remarks. Yes, okay, they said, there does seem to be some warming going on. But it's the natural way. Climate has changed throughout the Earth's history and this is just another example, they said. It's not because of anything that humans are doing. As the evidence poured in and that theme became more and more untenable, another phase of denial began. Yes, perhaps humans are having some effect, but the changes will be small and occur over centuries. And, besides, there's nothing we can really do about it.

Next they said the effects might be great but still happen over centuries. We would figure out what to do about it long before it became a problem.

And then, when it became obvious that change was happening a lot quicker than centuries, another phase made its appearance. Yes, they said, global warming, which long since had been transformed into "climate change" in public discourse, is happening, but look at all the benefits! We'll grow wheat on the tundra and drill for oil on the Arctic seabed. They were silent to the irony of pumping out more of the oil whose burning has contributed so greatly to the melting of the ice which makes the drilling possible.

We're now well into another phase of denial. The backers of this phase say that, yes, climate change is definitely a problem that is already having major impacts, and those impacts will intensify in the coming years. And, yes, we must do something about it. But, they add, we have to fix other problems before we tackle this one.

Those who take this view would never characterize themselves as deniers. They'd be insulted. They accept the scientific evidence as real, they say, and they know the atmosphere and the oceans are heating up. They suspect, as climate scientists in ever larger numbers are saying, that climate change, as predicted, is causing some of the extreme weather we're seeing and will see more of in the future. But, they say, there are just too many obstacles blocking immediate action.

Which means they are deniers. Because delay is denial.

As has been noted many times, "climate change" got little attention from the two major presidential candidates during the election campaign. While candidates like Jill Stein and Rocky Anderson discussed the subject at length, the only guys who had a chance of winning the White House avoided it. The biggest mention it got came during President Obama's press conference after the election, on Nov. 14. After explaining some of the initiatives he took during his first term'negotiating a mandated increase in vehicle fuel efficiency being an important one'Obama said:

But we haven't done as much as we need to. So what I'm going to be doing over the next several weeks, next several months, is having a conversation, a wide-ranging conversation with scientists, engineers and elected officials to find out what can'what more can we do to make short-term progress in reducing carbons, and then working through an education process that I think is necessary, a discussion, the conversation across the country about, you know, what realistically can we do long term to make sure that this is not something we're passing on to future generations that's going to be very expensive and very painful to deal with.

Serious, high-level talks about climate change leading to action are good. So hurrah to Obama's plan on that. But, with Mitt "I like coal" Romney out of the way, some actions can be taken now without further talk. And one of those is turning the mythical "war on coal" that corporate PR firms have been yammering garbage complaints about into the real thing.

That doesn't mean the "war on coal" has to be what it's called. On the other hand, if some terrorist group were knocking off 13,000 Americans a year, poisoning the lungs and hearts of tens of thousands of others and causing $62 billion in annual environmental damage, you can bet the response from Congress and the White House would be to call it war and act accordingly. That toll is exactly what coal mining and burning are exacting.

Whatever it's called, however, taking coal head-on certainly should not mean a war on coal miners.

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