Whistling Past the Coal Mine

Back when I was writing and broadcasting car reviews along with other topics, I worked hard to find funny ways to describe the truly awful fake wood that many carmakers slathered over auto dashboards years ago. One Lincoln I tested had what I determined was wood-grain shelf paper on the dash. Another I described as less realistic than the stock of a Daisy BB gun.

But my wife was the most creative. A Buick we drove that week had plastic wood grain with swirling blobs that were meant to evoke birds-eye maple.

"It looks like melanoma," Karen said. And believe me, I used that line.

Which is a long way around to get to my topic. One reason we aren't all walking around with real melanoma is President Ronald Reagan. He sent his VP, George H.W. Bush to sign what was called the Montreal Protocol, which banned ozone-depleting chemicals from commercial use like chlorofluourocarbons used as refrigerants in air conditioning.

This was after the world's scientific community spread the alarm about a growing void in the earth's ozone layer, you know, that thing that keeps us all from being fried like a strip of bacon. You see, that was back in the olden days when we listened to scientists and didn't assume they were all trying to control us with microchips in vaccines or something. You know, back when we figured we had really landed on the moon, before we all did our own research at the University of Google.

One thing, among many, I could never forgive Rush Limbaugh for, though he was good at it, was convincing people they really didn't have to get off the couch and do anything. All this climate stuff was scare-mongering by Al Gore and his band of commie radicals from Big Science who want to control you by, I don't know, making you believe in sciencey stuff. Don't worry. Coal is fine. That stuff coming out of your tailpipe is harmless. Just relax and buy a can of Snapple.

He was very effective with people who didn't think about things much, didn't read much, wanted easy answers for everything and didn't want to hear anything that contradicted that easy approach to problems. You know, like the President. That's why he gave Limbaugh the Presidential Medal of Freedom, before he succumbed to the science surrounding smoking.

Years ago I worked for stations that carried his show, and felt guilty for somehow collaborating in this stuff, though I tried my best on the air to correct it. But it laid the groundwork for today's skepticism that has people convinced the pandemic was no big deal, just ignore the 1.2-million people who died in the US and 7 million who died worldwide. It was all hype, and they probably died of something else, right? Fauci just didn't want you to know that because sinister conspiracy, blah, blah. And the vaccine? Forget it. Some kind of Bill Gates conspiracy, blah, blah.

So, given that climate change is a "hoax" as the President says, and he doesn't like windmills because those damned Brits put some up that can be seen from his golf course in Scotland, we don't need them here.

Besides, he says they can cause cancer. How? Whirring and humming, something, something. It's all a little vague.

And so, he won't approve any wind farms offshore here in the US and in fact, the US will pay you to go away. From the Newsletter Electrek...

New York state has announced a lawsuit against the Interior Department’s illegal $1 billion payment to an oil company to stop development of a wind farm off the New York Coast.

The project would have saved New Yorkers $10 billion and created 1,700 jobs, which would have conflicted with the Department of the Interior’s goals of raising your energy costs.

The other thing a lot of folks in the fossil fuel industry, or states that benefit from it, are concerned, really concerned about is the poor birds that, die every year flying into the big, ugly things. This week there was a big rally in Cheyenne, Wyoming,it's against windmills.

And, yes, birds do fly into them and the results aren't good for the bird. A study from 2014 estimates that nearly 700,000 birds die each year. That's a lot. Well, not as many as the 64 million killed by power lines, or the 4 billion who die from flying into buildings, or from your housecat.

As for solar, it's pretty hard to argue against it since, like wind, the source of the energy is completely free. But critics do anyway.

"Well, what do you do at night, huh?"

There is this wild new technology called batteries that might help with that. Texas, yes, blood red Texas, widened its lead as the country’s renewable energy leader in 2024, with growth in solar and wind power. Last year, renewables generated 23% of the nation's power. In Texas, here's the beakdown...

We know renewables are cheap and clean, and most of us, who don't live on Pennsylvania Avenue, know we don't want to keep pumping carbon into the atmosphere if we don't have to. So, why are we doing things like cutting a NASA program called the Orbiting Carbon Observatory? Inside Climate News described them this way...

The Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 and -3, or OCO-2 and -3, have been circling the globe for years, gathering some of the best data available on carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere.

They helped scientists determine that natural systems struggled in the extreme heat of 2023 and failed to pull in as much CO2 as normal. They’ve helped researchers track early indicators of agricultural drought in India, and measure climate-warming emissions coming out of coal power plants in Montana, Poland and Canada.

They are the “gold standard” for measuring the most abundant climate-warming gas in the atmosphere from space, according to NASA. Yet the space administration has proposed ending the satellites’ missions next year, part of the Trump administration’s proposed 24 percent reduction in the agency’s budget.

They are in orbit now, why cut funding? And that's not all.

The Trump administration has quietly removed an array of floating ocean observatories from waters off the Washington and Oregon coasts.

Their removal is part of a national dismantling of a network of sophisticated data buoys in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.

The National Science Foundation announced in May that it had started what it called a “descoping” of its Ocean Observatories Initiative. KUOW reports...

Those observatories monitor surface and underwater conditions 24/7 in what the science foundation calls “the most technologically advanced observational networks in the oceans.”

The moored buoys keep the pulse of the oceans as their temperature and chemistry rapidly change and provide real-time updates to mariners heading out into possibly dangerous waves.

We know the oceans are warming, polar ice is melting, glaciers are "calving" and sliding into the ocean as icebergs. Sea life is migrating north, including sharks. Coral reefs are bleaching and dying and storms are bigger. The ocean is more acidic, and we are removing the devices that keep track of all that? And the method we have chosen to address these issues?

Yeah but big countries like China still use coal, don't they? A lot less than they used to, and China installed 100 GW of wind turbines in 2025, equivalent to 40 nuclear reactors. The global wind market hit 176 GW of new capacity in 2025, a 45% year-on-year rise and the strongest annual growth on record, with China becoming the first country to surpass 100 GW of wind installations in a single year.

Let's not forget that the Wall Street heavy hitters are all in on AI and the data centers needed to produce it. Those data centers need huge amounts of electricity we aren't producing yet, and water we just don't have. We can't make the water (sorry, Panhandle) but we will need the power generation. And the market rise the President talks about constantly to get your mind off gas prices and Jeffrey Epstein is fueled largely by monstrous AI investments.

We know what the administration's plan is. They posted it on Truth Social. He called it the return of "beautiful, clean coal." That does not exist.

And if we can do that without ruining what climate we have left, that sounds like a win. I mean, I say that without the experience of going bankrupt running a casino, but it seems like a good bet to me.

If only there were some way to monitor that climate, I don't know, from space or in the ocean, maybe? That might be a good idea.

And look at it this way, the less you spend on fuel to generate power, the less you'll spend on your electric bill and the more money you'll have for investing in Trump crypto or that nifty Trump watch you've had your eye on.