Timothy Birdnow

Biden has cracked down on coal mining, banning coal mining and methane harvesting in the Wyoming's Powder River Basin.

According to the Daily Caller:

"The Biden administration moved on Thanksgiving eve to bar future coal leasing in the Powder River Basin, one of America’s most coal-rich regions, according to multiple reports.

The Powder River Basin, a region that spans parts of Montana and Wyoming, accounted for about 43% of U.S. coal in 2019, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The administration made its move to formally end coal leasing in the area and roll back previous approvals for development plans on Wednesday as Americans prepared to enjoy the Thanksgiving holiday, according to E&E News.

"The decision is to make no federal coal available for future leasing,” Todd Yeager, the field manager for the Buffalo office of the Bureau of Land Management, wrote in a filing announcing the move, according to E&E News. Yeager added that the decision will take about 48 billion short tons of coal off the table for mining and development. "

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America has the largest coal reserves in the world and we would still be swimming in energy if we had no oil or natural gas at all thanks to the compacted dinosaurs and Jurassic plants buried below ground.

Coal was and is still used for generating electricity and it comes in a handy-dandy lump that can be shipped by rail or truck. Also, it was used in steel and other metal manufacturing as a way to smelt the ore (he who smelt it melt it, methinks). Time was people had coal furnaces in their homes. My father speaks of his; he had to go down in the basement every few hours and restoke it. A pain surely but I suspect with modern technology we could devise a fully automated form of coal furnace, perhaps grinding the coal up into small particles and having them in a chute with a thermostat that opened the door for a given amount of time to let the coal flow into the fire box. I don't know but we could warn our homes with coal if need be.

There was work done to try to convert coal into a kind of artificial gasoline. It stopped because more promising avenues were available, and petroleum products were cheap, but it could still be done. And of course we could always go back to steam engine cars!

Any way you slice it coal has a lot of value and should not be neglected by the U.S. There are ways to make it less environmentally polluting.

I may be biased; my great grandfather (one of them) was a coal miner in southern Illinois. (My other great grandfather was a railroad man and may have used coal from grandpa Alblinger to run his engine.) And my home town of St. Louis is home to the two largest coal companies in the world - Peabody Energy and Arch Coal.

At any rate, I'm always a sucker for older tech that worked. I pine for the days of airships and telegraphs and Aladdin kerosene lamps and Stanley Steamers. I like to imagine how things would have gone had this old technology won out rather than this new-fangled stuff. (I'm always looking for ways to adapt the old tech to use in my luxurious resort in the deep ozarks, the fabled Ozark Hilton.)

But Biden shows he didn't learn a thing from both his and Harris' defeat. The Democrats never will; they are too beholden to the Gang Green.

Ah well; Wyoming is the state that gave us the Cheney family, so they can lump it!

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 11:14 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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