How's Obama Doing on Our Transition from Dirty Coal to Clean Energy?

By Jeff Biggers, AlterNet. Posted April 28, 2009.

Along the same lines of conversion, DOI head Ken Salazar made all of those gamblers in Atlantic City, New Jersey look up as he touted the possibilities of offshore wind in replacing coal-fired plants this April:

"The idea that wind energy has the potential to replace most of our coal-burning power today is a very real possibility," Salazar said. "It is not technology that is pie-in-the sky; it is here and now."

FERC Chair Jon Wellinghoff wins the prize for the most honest words, when he announced at the U.S. Energy Association forum that "We may not need any, ever," new coal-fired plants. Wellinghoff hailed renewables like wind, solar and biomass as the needed energy to meet baseload capacity and future energy demands.

10) Why the Coal Mining Means Job Argument is Over, Done, Finished, Bogus: Green Jobs, and Coal River Wind
Operation Appalachian Spring, 2009

In the face of a 6,000 acre mountaintop removal strip mine, an extraordinary community of coalfield residents and coal mining families in the Coal River Mountain area of West Virginia have drawn up a proposal for an industrial wind farm that has permanently changed the coal-equals-jobs stranglehold. The proposed Coal River Mountain wind farm, consisting of 164 wind turbines and generating 328 megawatts of electricity, would create 200 jobs, provide over $1.74 million in annual property taxes to Raleigh County; and coal severance taxes related to proposed mountaintop removal mining, by comparison, would provide the county with only $36,000 per year. That's 200 jobs for life versus a similar amount of stripping jobs for only 14 years or so of coal.

The Coal River Wind Project, atop a mountain range that is currently being destroyed by strip mining, is the ultimate ground zero in the clean energy debate. The reality of its success or death, like that of the coalfields across Appalachia and the Midwest, now hinges on the intervention of President Obama and his administration.

In the meantime, facing a broad and slightly bizarre Temporary Restraining Order--for "all other persons allied, associated, confederating, conspiring, or acting in concert with them"-- a growing civil disobedience movement to block mountaintop removal operations by Massey Energy has emerged in the Coal River Mountain area to remind the nation of the urgency of the moment.

Let's hope the next 100 days bring us a real green jobs package for the coalfields, a Coal Miners G.I. bill for retraining and education, more coal-fired plant conversions, and a resolution to the murkiness in the Waxman-Markey climate change bill that will effectively shift us away from the destruction of extracting coal, transporting coal, burning coal, storing coal ash, and the chimera of burying CO2 in the earth.

In the meantime, wunderkind cellist Ben Sollee from Kentucky asks for a few honest words:

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