Did you ever inhale coal smoke? We don't need to burn coal and nobody wants it, except the Koch brothers. The Koch brother's inheritance is coal based. The Koch's are almost matching the Republican Party in campaign spending. Republicans are very unpopular. Without the Koch money they can't win elections.
Coal is following whale oil into the extinction bin of energy sources.
The Republican Party has chosen to march to extinction along with coal. This summer the coal industry and the Republican Party will march into oblivion shoulder to shoulder.
“Called the Manning brothers of climate change, the mild-mannered, dry-witted Nordhauses are scions of a New Mexico family long rooted in the land, which powerfully shaped who the brothers became. But for the Nordhaus brothers, protecting the earth depends far more on dispassionate thinking and intellectual rigor than on showy protests outside the White House.
They have neatly divided their world — Bill is the academic theorist, Bob the legal mind and political pragmatist — but their work is intertwined…
Bob wrote the provision — it became Section 111(d) of the Clean Air Act — at a time when carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, was not considered harmful. It was not until 2009 that the Environmental Protection Agency defined carbon dioxide as a harmful pollutant because of its contribution to global warming. Thus it falls into the category of an unknown “pollutant of the future.” Section 111(d), after languishing in obscurity for decades, is now the legal rationale for the Obama administration’s plan to regulate carbon emissions without a law passed by Congress…
In the ensuing decades at Yale, Bill developed an economic model that put a price tag on the effects of climate change, like more droughts, flooding and crop failures and stronger hurricanes. He called it the Dynamic Integrated Climate-Economy model, or DICE.
“The name was both descriptive (representing a dynamic integrated model of climate and the economy) but also consciously aimed to suggest that we are gambling with the future of our planet,” Bill wrote in an email.
DICE profoundly changed climate policy. Although the chief political argument against curbing carbon emissions from cars and coal plants has long been that doing so would harm the economy, the DICE models show that, depending on various scenarios, one ton of carbon pollution can inflict $20 to $30 in economic damage — a major cost, given that the global economy emits about 36 billion tons of carbon a year.
From:
New York Times
May 11, 2014
Brothers Battle Climate Change on Two Fronts
