Stan My Man

Our smokestacks can still breathe freely just like you or I can. But the eco-warriors won't quit: they're still trying to stop our strip mines, tax benefits, and smoke stacks.

That's why it's very good news that today President Bush, himself a former energy executive, nominated Stanley Suboleski to be assistant secretary of fossil energy, a top post in the Department of Energy.

Normally, I am opposed to anyone trying to regulate fossil fuels. We in the industry are 100% trustworthy when it comes to looking after the air, the groundwater, and our mines. However, in Mr. Suboleski, we get a regulator who knows that regulation can be a burden--one that should be vigorously challenged.

Stan, in his academic and lobbying roles, has been a champion of industrial freedom and a foe to environmental regulation. But he doesn't just talk the talk. From 2001-2003, as chief operating officer of the mining company Massey Energy, Stan lead a company that courageously took on $2.4 billion in fines for more than 4,000 Clean Water Act violations at its coal operations in West Virginia and Kentucky. Stan and Massey Energy didn't just complain about regulations--they attacked them head-on. Standing up to regulatory agencies isn't for the faint-of-heart. Stan, as a new leader of those agencies, will have the courage to put these regulatory agents back in their rightful place: in their offices shuffling papers and not poking around our mines, obsessing over drinking water quality, or worrying about what's in our air.

With Al Gore and the IPCC in the news so much recently, many of us in the industry were getting worried about all the attention to fossil fuels. Now, with Stan's nomination, all our nation's hardworking smokestacks can breathe a little easier and more freely.

Some call it pollution. We call it life.

A number of my readers have shallowly suggested that this ad is a spoof. But you can be quite certain that it's very real and very serious. I'm proud that my company helped pay for its productions costs.

The Impermeability of Boundaries

I just came across two stories that defy common sense.

One claims that DDT levels in human breast milk are elevated across the world, but are falling wherever the chemical has been banned. The study's authors apparently forgot that people don't eat DDT. It is sprayed into the air, not into peoples' bodies. So how could the chemical get into human bodies and breast milk?

A similar story claims that human pharmaceuticals are showing up in drinking water supplies all over the world. But we put medicines into our bodies, not into rivers. How could an entire watershed get human pharmaceuticals in it?

Both of these stories make it sound as if there is almost no boundary between our bodies and the earth. As if what we put onto the earth will eventually flow through our own veins, and the things we put in our bodies will flow through the veins of the earth. As if the boundary between our bodies and the earth is mostly imaginary and permeable. Is this some kind of creeping eco-mystical religion?

I am right now looking at a perfectly intact boundary between our bodies and the planet: it's called skin. My body doesn't need a thing from the earth, and the earth gets nothing from me. If we suddenly started thinking that our bodies were somehow connected to the earth--as these two studies suggest--the logical conclusion would be for us all to become environmentalists and take on some kind of spiritual approach to the connection between our own bodies and the earth!

Studies like this only contribute to the dangerous idea that our human fate and the planet's fate are ecologically linked. In the interest of the economic well-being of industries like mine and many others, we should think long and hard before publishing misleading studies like these.

Building a Better Planet

I want to have some forward-thinking discussions here about building a better planet.  

Environmentalists are becoming increasingly bold in asserting their satisfaction with the natural systems of this planet, and becoming increasingly hostile to those of us who have the power and will to build a much more suitable planet. 

 

My small coal-fired generating plant is only a first example. 

Environmentalists--both from our neighborhood and elsewhere--insisted that I didn't have the right to build my plant on my own land in my own neighborhood with my own money.  A truckload of money, my team of lawyers, a P.R. campaign, and a construction crew proved them dead wrong. 

 

Coal has been good for our neighborhood.  Truck traffic is up, the particulate matter keeps the bugs down, and my wife's neighborhood medical practice (respiratory therapy) is thriving.  Our little company has even moved mountains: where there were once just abandoned mountain ranges in West Virginia, with nothing but trees, trails, creeks, wild animals, fishermen and hunters taking up space, we've shaved the tops off the mountains, excavated the coal seams, and flattened the land to make way for our vision of high-end shopping and housing.  

It's beautiful: coal doesn't only benefit us here at the point of combustion; its benefits extend to the growing parking lots and shrinking wilderness of West Virginia.

We've taken some important but modest steps here in my little Dallas suburb.  But we're proud to be leading the way into a bold future.  Will you join us?