More on the Coal Campaign in Kansas
In true journalistic fashion, Andy Revkin of the New York Times dug deeper into the controversial coal campaign run in Kansas after the state rejected a new coal-plant. Curiously, he surfaced with some interesting investment numbers with regards to Venezuelan coal.
For background, see Grist and Climate Progress’s discussion. In short, after the state refused to allow the construction of a new coal-fired plant, a local utility conspired with a larger energy firm to run a smear campaign against the decision, accusing it of supporting foreign energy enemies like Hugo Chavez.
In more recent news, Revkin has posted his correspondence with Peabody Energy, the world’s biggest private coal company. Ends up, they’ve a 25.5 stake in a Venezuelan coal mine.
Revkin pried, and this is what he was told:
It should come as little surprise to anyone that a global energy company obtains energy from around the globe. But we welcome a debate on U.S. coal supplies versus natural gas. The U.S. is a net exporter of coal, and that position continues to grow. In addition, America has 250 years of coal supplies at current usage rates, versus just a tiny fraction of that in proven natural gas reserves. The U.S. is a net importer of natural gas, and that position also continues to grow. According to the current U.S. E.I.A. Monthly Energy Review, the U.S. is producing less natural gas today than it did in 1975, while natural gas imports have grown more than 300%. The point, again, is that the U.S. can use abundant domestic coal or repeat the flawed oil model and rely on global gas imports.
Nice maneuver to stay clear of a to-the-point answer, and nice work in exposing their hypocrisy!
November 29th, 2007 at 1:28 pm
But you still don’t believe in conspiracies from the ‘Green side’?
People everywhere do screwy, underhanded things for money.
A liberal friend of mine, one of those teachers I’ve mentioned, even feels it’s okay to lie for a good cause - the old ‘well, even if global warming is a bunch of bull, we still need to get off of oil’ line that I’ve frequently heard even on this upstanding blog.
One of your ‘giants’ - FDR - was involved in what some call the “Mother of all Conspiracies” - WWII! And that’s not just a nutty, foil-hat idea: Read Churchill. He talks about it in his Nobel-winning series on the war……
November 29th, 2007 at 1:38 pm
Ron:
Your comment is a classic bate and switch — The issue here is not about whether “liberals” engage in deception on occasion - I’m sure they do, although more often than not they’re not motivated by greed.
It’s whether fossil fuel interests created and funded a smear campaign based on lies and falsehoods — which they did.
Pretty simple.
November 29th, 2007 at 2:34 pm
Ron, When right wingers or their patrons do something dreadful, they give no thought to what they are going to do next. Conservatives always cover up their mistakes by attacking Liberals.
November 29th, 2007 at 8:04 pm
You guys are funny. You got your backs up and that wasn’t any kind of an attack on anybody in particular - except FDR.
John: What do you suppose is the usual motivation for liberals to decieve?
November 30th, 2007 at 11:01 am
Sex?
November 30th, 2007 at 12:42 pm
Can you send me a pic?
November 30th, 2007 at 12:51 pm
OK. This is as far as this thread goes….
November 30th, 2007 at 1:26 pm
LOL, sorry Joe.
November 30th, 2007 at 1:50 pm
Ron:
My back wasn’t up — just amused that you went straight for that oh so sophisticated “Liberals do it too, (nya nya ya nya, so there!)” argument.
I would say the number one reason that liberals engage in deception and spinning to consolidate or gain power — but they want power for different reasons than conservatives. Most liberals have some notion of government as a force for good … conservatives focus on private gain.
November 30th, 2007 at 4:04 pm
I’ll buy that as a generalization. Liberals focus more on the collective, while conservatives focus more on the individual. I think that used to be truer, however, than it is today. These days I’m not so sure the distinction is that distinct.
November 30th, 2007 at 7:58 pm
OK, I’m just wicked confused here: I see a coal mining interest and Venezuela in the main story. But somehow, the comments immediately launch into a discussion of “liberals.”
I am trying to imagine which is more ignorant: characterizing Peabody Energy or Hugo Chavez as “liberal.” The one is a fossil fuel company that is almost certainly as self-servingly neocon as it is possible to be, while the other is a (on his most reactionary days) a socialist who despises liberals (on a principled rather than only pragmatic basis) almost as much as a neocon.
Have I just missed something here — not that that is such an uncommon an event, I admit — I mean, in the alcohol induced fog of a Friday evening, is there a third party that slipped in and that I missed? Or are you folks really that absolutely clueless about what the word “liberal” means?
Sorry to be snarky; its been a long week. I get as impatient with my own confusion as other people’s, if that is any comfort.
November 30th, 2007 at 11:24 pm
Well, the word ‘liberal’ has had quite a workout over the past couple of hundred years. What do you think the word means?
December 1st, 2007 at 11:33 am
I would first simply observe the less than sterling rhetorical stunt of answering a question with a question.
“Liberal” is a social/political position that is predicated upon the idea of the individual as the atomically basic unit of such discourse. It can run the gamut of “laissez-faire” approaches that (in the US, at least) came to be viewed as as “conservatism” — *NOT*, it is to be noted, the morph’d contemporary olio known as “neoconservatism.” It is not immediately evident to me that this latter has anything like a principled center to it. What we in the US refer to as conservatism could more properly be referred to as “classical liberalism.”
More progressive flavors of liberalism retain the focus upon the individual as the atom, but approach social and economic problems with a more meliorative and, to varying degrees, interventionist approach.
You did not specifically ask in the above about the contrast of liberalism with other theories. Why is that? It seems rather obvious to me that one cannot say what a position is without saying what it is not.
Socialism has no single definition, but I would note certain salient features. First, in stark contrast with liberalism, socialism is more holistic and emphasizes the social unit as basic, the “individual” being an emregent construct. (There is some historical, anthropological, and psychological legitimacy to this claim. We all begin as members of a community and only later “find ourselves” as individuals.)
This emphasis on the atomic nature of the community is itself something that plays out in a spectrum of positions, from an absolute focus on the whole and more or less total disregard of the emergent individual, to variously balanced foci on both that view the holistic social unit as a stage in augmenting the emergent individual. Chavez, in his apparent grab at unbridled power, seems to be very much of the former variety.
In addition, there are other features that can and do play out. “Socialism” can be more in the way of philosophical approach to, and methodology of, critiqueing power relations, especially as these present themselves through inequable distributions of property and money. Or again, it can be a legal system in which the laws favor the providers of labor and service rather than the holders of money and capital.
It is worth noting that socialism is not automatically antithetical to market economy, any more than capitalism automatically assumes a market or precludes a planned or command economy. We have seen instances of combinations of all the above.
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August 23rd, 2008 at 2:09 am
“Why are these men smiling?” the full-page ad asks below photos of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and Russian President Vladimir Putin. “Because the recent decision by the Sebelius Administration means Kansas will import more natural gas from countries like Russia, Venezuela and Iran,” the ad states.
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Mike lou
Kansas Drug Addiction