By Charlie Meyer:

Coal is a sensitive subject in Appalachia. Personally, I have cousins in a southwestern county of the state that make their living from coal mining; however, I can't force myself to blindly chant the “Friends of Coal” sacred cow mantra. There isn't enough beer....even in Morgantown. All is NOT well, and Senator Byrd is correct that either the industry changes with the times, or we'll end up being left behind. Stonewalling didn't even work for the late President “Tricky Dick” Nixon.

My late mother was a coal miner's daughter. I recall forty-odd years ago receiving a varnished lump of coal with my name in glitter on it from my late grandparents for Christmas; puzzled as even hints of lumps of coal were usually what parents kept their children on good behavior to avoid in New York.

“King Coal” no longer reigns as large as he once did, if at all. In some counties, though, mining provides the more affluent households money that does filter down into the rest of the community. Before you go hog wild cheering for King Coal, inject a bit of realism before you get tempted to bow down before him, forsaking science and common sense.

The recent publication online of stolen emails from scientists at the University of East Anglia has been whipped into a tempest in a teapot by the conspiracy theorists, and their mouthpiece, that F-word News Channel. Warnings of the effects of global warming and climate change have long been established by scientists around the globe, not by the post-mortem scheming of Dr. Joseph “Big Lie” Goebbels, the Nazi Minister of Propaganda.

Before one feels picked on in Appalachia, scholarly research in science involves a significant number of very smart scientists all over the world, and the exchange of ideas between scientists in the stolen emails lacks the tidiness and polish of a mining industry public relations spin doctor playing to common folks' fears and emotions. I'd rather believe thousands of scientists around the world before Glenn Beck, whose science experience was generally confined to “recreational chemistry.” The science is hard, and the collaborative research process tends not to make the front cover of check-out line tabloids. Sorry, science is not a simple process easily condensed to the “sound bite.”

The other week, I admitted that I, along with many of my contemporaries, bailed out on those pesky math and science courses in the 1970s. Brute will through the technologies got me my submariner dolphins aboard nuclear submarines, but that was thirty-odd years ago. The internal workings of the Basset Hound go well outside double-entry accounting and the dynamics behind Machiavelli's “The Prince” (probably former Vice President Dick Cheney's self help book.) My “science guy” is my veterinarian, who, on Doc's worst day, forgets far less science than I'll ever know. Cherished tails wag because of it, slinging drool to keep the dry cleaner in town solvent. The sciences are hard going for most of us, but ignoring the sciences doesn't work either.

Who do we believe, then? I think the answer is found not by Greenpeace and their ilk, nor by the Wall Street and the corporate mining interests, but somewhere in the middle. Most of us spent adolescence rent-free at home, grass mowing, leaf raking, or snow shoveling forms of slave labor aside. Early in our college days, one generally learned that there's a cost to almost everything; buy more beer now, and discover the many iterations of various flavors of ramen noodles not much later. The bill always comes due. Half of our domestic electricity is generated from coal. I really don't think we'll be able to totally write off coal, but the technologies to bring less polluting coal generation will have to continue to be be developed, albeit at a high cost. We certainly don't want the effects of freewheeling coal burning, competing with Peking in the “On a clear day, I see my fuzzy hand through the smog” environmental demolition derby for fat profits for coal producers, b! ut at society's expense.

I spent several years around nuclear reactors; the Navy had an enviable safety record, but cost-cutting for profitability wasn't in Admiral Rickover's mind. The international community is still shoveling large amounts of money to clean up the old Soviet Union's shoddy, cut-rate nuclear practices. Nuclear waste storage is the ultimate Not In My Back Yard (NIMBY) issue; dwarfing controversial “Almost Level, West Virginia” mountain-top removal mining, or where to stick Guantanamo detainees.

That does not mean we can continue to live in “La-la Land,” ignoring substantial environmental hazards with coal and coal mining   Before we close the state borders in a foolish act of defiance, we need to realize that mountain-top removal mining leaves a lousy taste in a growing majority of mouths in these United States. We get lots of their tax dollars.

Senator Byrd's seniority in the Senate has brought a lot of federal money to our state, not only positioning us for the future, but providing far more jobs than the coal industry alone. As his letter indicated, coal mining today provides a little more than a third of mining jobs in 1979. Twenty thousand jobs is nothing to sneeze at here, and they're relatively high paying jobs (credit the union, not Massey Energy's head coal mogul Don Blankenship) that benefit their communities, but it's not the “whole enchilada,” folks. Were the “Friends of Coal” to decide play protectionist blackmail in order to play by the rules of yesteryear, it could well backfire to the detriment of the West Virginia anemic economy. Remember the dinosaur, and I'm not poking fun at Senator Byrd's age: evolve or die. We ought to be thankful that we have a statesman instead of a sleazy politician, even if he tells us what some of don't want to hear.

“Something is rotten in the State of Denmark.” That something relates to the future of 500 men and women just laid off in Clay County as well as thousands of other West Virginia workers. Environmentalists and anti-capitalist left wingers attacked their livelihood for years. Now they get a ball bat to the back of the knees by a man they counted on as an ally, Senator Robert C. Byrd.

 The “State of Denmark” welcomes United Nations luminaries from around the world to discuss what Senator Byrd calls “mounting” scientific evidence for man-made global warming. The Copenhagen conference seeks to convince Obama to enact draconian regulations that will cripple our economy and make all of our electric bills, as the president himself once claimed “skyrocket.” Senator Jim Webb, Democrat from Virginia, warned Obama to not try and bind himself to any suggestions made by the United Nations without consulting a Congress already antsy over plummeting poll numbers and 10% unemployment.

Byrd suggested that the coal industry needs to adapt to the times. His timing suggests that he refers to the severe regulations now imposed by the Environmental Protection Agency and the killing off of mountaintop removal. He tiptoes past direct mention of Obama’s costly cap and trade plan and speaks in general terms. This separates him from words that attract attention and spark a negative reaction, but allies him with the opponents of West Virginia business and labor.

The Senator puts himself on the wrong side of history. Studies that supposedly prove that man causes global warming, or even that the Earth actually is warming, rely heavily on statistics gathered by the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit. Scholars with a known track record of skepticism have found it nearly impossible in the past to gain access to the CRU’s raw data. NASA data has also been hard for researchers to access if they are known to be attacking a global warming theory. One skeptic had to file a Freedom of Information Act request and still has not seen the data after two years (when I was a kid I requested information for a science project from NASA that made it to my house in six weeks.) Even worse, the University of East Anglia’s CRU announced recently that it actually dumped all the raw data. It now offers the information in an altered “homogenized” form. This is akin to a prosecutor in a murder trial telling the jury that th! ere is no direct evidence of a crime, but they can read an essay that he wrote about how it happened.

Probably the most damning issue lies in CRU computer files and e mails hacked into by Russian journalists and reported on by Jonathan Leake in Britain’s most respected newspaper, The London Times. They uncover efforts by Professor Phil Jones of the CRU to not only coordinate against attacks by skeptical scientists, but also to deny them the opportunity to review raw data or even publish their own research. A Penn State professor actually proposed that the rules of publication in one academic journal be changed to ensure the exclusion of a scientist’s work because the paper attacked the global warming theories. These are the sources of what Senator Byrd calls “mounting evidence” of man-made global warming, people remind one of Richard Nixon and Watergate more than professional scientists. These experts love their theories and hate capitalism so much that they want to enact policies that will result in not only job loss, but also real suffering. They are willi! ng to commit fraud on a massive scale to get what they want, but do they understand the consequences?   If electric rates “skyrocket” as Obama suggests, America will see all too many people opting out of the electrical grid because they will not be able to afford power. West Virginia miners have already lost their jobs because the Environmental Protection Agency has called carbon dioxide (something our own bodies produce) a dangerous public health problem. Now Obama and the left wing want to bring far more sinister and dangerous policies to our country.

Probably the worst problem with carbon mania is that it does deflect attention from the real progress already made against the junk manufacturing and other sources actually put into the air. As technology advances, so must pollution control. Senator Byrd rightly points out that West Virginia has emerged as a leader in developing responsible coal technology. The real problem does not come from carbon dioxide, but other pollutants that we must find ways to gradually reduce over time to improve the quality of the air and water we use. If government and research resources pour into this straw man of an environmental issue, how much gets left over for reducing other kinds of emissions?

Reducing pollution should be the aim of industrialized societies everywhere, but it needs to be done reasonably. It needs to take into account the jobs and real lives of the people affected. It cannot rely on scientists that create studies, but will not share how they got their data. Science is at its best when its assertions are constantly under fire. In this way we get closer to the truth. It grows dangerous when it demands that we accept its tenets in the manner of religious faith. Science is the servant of mankind, it ought to never be our master.