Do You Really Understand Obama And Coal?
****Obama’s stance on coal power will NOT put coal workers out of work, at least not during his term.****
The first thing you should understand is what is being taxed, and where the revenues will go. What’s being taxed are the pollutants being emitted by the coal power plant, and the revenues go towards developing clean energy. This can be looked at as the plant buying the right to pollute, and it accomplishes two things:
1) The plant will be VERY encouraged to be as “clean” as possible. In a capitalist society, the way to motivate someone to take action is by making inaction unbearably expensive
2) The funding for development of clean, alternative energy will be coming from those developing cheap, dirty energy (coal)!
The USA gets the vast majority of its electrical energy from coal power. This is *THE* dirtiest available energy source today. “Clean coal” is still much much much dirtier than any other alternatives (oil power, natural gas, renewable energy, wind, nuclear power, geothermal, hydroelectric, etc….).
Our country is so dependent on coal, that even forcing plants to directly feel the repercussions of their impact on the environment will keep the blue collar workers in their jobs. The cost will be passed onto consumers, who will, in essence be paying extra to develop clean power (this is NECESSARY).
This is what I think. This is a big talking point today. However, McCain and Obama are on the same page on “Cap and Trade” and have said pretty much the same things about it, this shouldn’t be a deciding factor for anyone’s voting decision.
This distortion of Obamba’s poistion is an obvious ploy to scare coal workers in PA and Ohio. McCain already has WV. Obama is still up on PA (all polls) and Ohio (most polls).
There are already plenty of Coal Burning plants. The Coal industry wouldn’t become bankrupt if no new COAL plants are built.
Nowhere did he say he wants to “bankrupt the coal industry” or that the coal industry will be bankrupted. He is that if someone tries to build a NEW coal burning plant, it wouldn’t be feasible economically, because of the cap and trade system (which McCain also supports) that’s what he was addressing the “go bankrupt” comment to.
The reality is NEW coal plants would be discouraged under cap and trade and nobody would go “Bankrupt” unless they were plain stupid.
PS I also think you answered your own question. You might get more answers and provide more enlightenment if you waited to see what people said before giving your answer.
PPS Then again, people like Aspot don’t even understand the question or your comments.
Obama is for complete SOCIALISM, so your argument regarding capitalism is moot.
You should listen to the interview that he gave in San Francisco. Under his “cap and trade” plan, coal plants would be capped at zero and would have to purchase all of their credits for their emissions. Those costs would have to be passed on to the customers of the utilities. By his own admission in the interview, the cost of energy would skyrocket and the coal industry would be bankrupted. All existing coal plants would become obsolete overnight. Since Mr. Obama also opposes Nuclear, the cleanest of all sources, one can only wonder where the power is going to come from. The wind only blows strong enough to generate electricity 7.5% of the time and blows very little at night when peak demand is required. The technology that Mr. Obama talks so much about hasn’t been invented yet. There are good reasons to reduce pollution, but “global warming” isn’t one of them since only 3.5% of Carbon dioxide is generated by man. The rest comes from volcanos and the ocean.