drbuzz0 said:

If you have not been a reader of this blog much, I’ve expressed the opinion that affordable and cleaner/safer energy can be achieved by means of nuclear fission.

I find coal so extremely costly to human health, the enviornment, the econemy both directly and indirectly that it is not worth the cheap direct price. Coal fires are just one of the big costs of coal.

I’d like to stop using it for base load power and start cleaning up the mess that has been made in the process of extrating it.

Coal mine disasters, ash spills, cave ins and sink holes already cost lives.

Emissions cost even more.

I’ve followed the Depleted Cranium blog where Google points me about coal fires. Otherwise, I haven’t found my way around to other threads all that much.

I do not believe in fertility “control” of the already huge human race. I advocate large families worldwide, so that far more people may experience life. However, as the ever growing human race increasingly fills the planet, presumably, eventually, some population accommodating changes in the commonly used technologies may need to be made, as cities naturally swell and coalesce into one another, as people multiply more and more. So I agree with you about nuclear power, for what else could adequate power huge megacities that may tend to naturally grow and fill with people, seemingly “out of control?” Far better to explore cost-effective ways to clean up some of our technologies, than to pollute the body directly with harsh, experimental, shoddy, Big Pharma contraceptive potions and poisons. They call it “natural increase” for a reason. Family size used to be considered “uncontrollable,” and with the bewildering array of shoddy anti-life methods available now, I consider it still practically and morally “uncontrollable,” well except for the perspective of welcome “all the children God gives,” and letting God decide the proper population size.

Actually, I think the underground coal fires are but a minor nuisance cost of coal. We hear little about the coal fires, because they are largely inconsequential for most people. The big cost, is the dirty, dangerous job of mining coal. It’s risky to human life. However, people need the jobs, and are willing to do it for us. Until we actually make serious strides to go ahead with more nuclear power, we are economically, even politically stuck with coal, because most of the “green” electricity is still not dependable for basic 24-7 baseload, and too expensive for the populous poor masses to afford.

And I think that the millions of smoky cooking fires in growing cities, pose a much greater pollution hazard to so many billions of people, than uncontrollably naturally spreading underground coal fires. There’s a simple solution to the cooking fires problem. The electrification of most every remote village. Obviously, at least here in the United States, half our electricity comes from coal. So we aren’t near ready to reduce our coal consumption, and as populations naturally rise, and as very populous countries like China and India modernize, coal mining and consumption, is going to probably, at least temporarily, have to increase. Pie-in-the-sky “environmental” non-solutions, simply don’t work, until issues such as economics, affordability, and basic human freedoms are also factored in and considered fairly.

By most practical measures, there’s places all around where we can put more people, so that people are free to go on reproducing their precious darling babies naturally without polluting their bodies with any form of “birth control.” But in some sense, most all countries already have “more than enough people,” if all that was considered is the bare minimum people to make a society work. But we aren’t mere cogs in a socialist machine state. But for many poor countries not doing enough to modernize, they can tend to be “bursting at the seams” with people, when it comes to easily treatable factors like proper disposal of human wastes. So what is far more urgent, than doing much about coal, is promoting freedom, leading to more economic prosperity, so that more people can afford proper indoor flush toilets, to help keep their waterways cleaner.

        Pronatalist said:

Because you like a “free ride” also. If you like affordable electricity, or think we might have to observe the laws of physics, then I can see them letting most major coal fires burn unchecked. The cost of fighting the coal fires can easily outweigh any possible benefit.

If you have not been a reader of this blog much, I’ve expressed the opinion that affordable and cleaner/safer energy can be achieved by means of nuclear fission. I find coal so extremely costly to human health, the enviornment, the econemy both directly and indirectly that it is not worth the cheap direct price. Coal fires are just one of the big costs of coal. I’d like to stop using it for base load power and start cleaning up the mess that has been made in the process of extrating it.

Coal mine disasters, ash spills, cave ins and sink holes already cost lives. Emissions cost even more.

        Dr Robotnik said:

Surprising that the stuff coal companies get to dump on the government to clean up or deal with gets so little attention.

As far as fires go then I could understand if it is in a mine from the 1800’s and there is no longer any trace of the original owner, but if a modern coal company has a fire that is polluting the local water and air and endangering lives, then damnit they should be required to put it out, regardless of the expense, because it’s their damn problem and its damaging more than their own property.

Why get a free ride?

Because you like a “free ride” also. If you like affordable electricity, or think we might have to observe the laws of physics, then I can see them letting most major coal fires burn unchecked. The cost of fighting the coal fires can easily outweigh any possible benefit.

There’s also the matter of safety, in that human lives might be needlessly risked in gloriously futile fire suppression efforts. Once a mine catches fire, it may simply be too dangerous or impossible to reach the fire to control it. Isn’t cave-ins and explosions among the possible risks? The main concern is the safety of the miners, and running the mine properly. Once it catches fire, isn’t it already often much too late to do much anything about it?

        Q said:

There are fissures and porous ground and abandoned mine tunnels also make the problem much worse. The fire also burns out coal and creates voids under the ground as it burns, and oxygen can flow through those.

Retard.

Mich does have a point though. He should have said something more like “Fire doesn’t burn so fast underground as to make it much a problem.” The lack of air slows the burn, but doesn’t always stop it.

The oxygen in our atmosphere is so reactive that it can burn things underground. So in a way, we are choking in the rampant plant “pollution” of oxygen. But then we don’t think so, because we need oxygen to breathe, so it’s a good thing there’s so much of it.

        drbuzz0 said:

Yes, it is very bad and India is one of the worst places because of the population density, with many living in areas that are not fit for human habitation because of these fires. There are equally bad fires in the US, but generally nobody lives over them.

It is good that humans can alter the environment for human benefit, but I think these days of “environmental” extremism, we forget about the cost-benefit calculation, that helps determine whether intervention is beneficial to humans. I think many wildfires, and especially the underground coal fires, aren’t worth fighting, for several reasons. We simply can’t afford the high cost of taming all of nature just yet, and some things are better left wild, at least for now.

Reasons why most underground coal fires should be left to grow wild:

1. Because many are too far gone to control, out of control, and impossible to control.

2. Because many of them are in unpopulated regions, and thus, aren’t much of a real problem.

3. Because they spread so slowly.

4. Because we can’t control everything anyway.

5. Because it’s cheaper to move the people out of the way of the naturally growing underground coal fires.

Like Josh says, I think it’s mostly a non-problem, as we can’t seem to control weather nor volcanoes either. Sometimes it’s better to just nature do its thing. But I disagree with Josh’s statement about needing to reshape society to use less consumption and energy. That ideas just isn’t consistent with leaving such things wild. Wild then should mean not needlessly interfering with people’s freedom, which means let them consume, use energy, produce things, multiply their growing human numbers, etc.

The people at the Jharia coal fields in India, should be allowed to move somewhere better, or to stay put, as they choose.

So let the people move if they want, or stay if they want. It seems to me that if there are big coal companies supposedly responsible, then they would be liable to assist in people’s or village’s moving expenses, but not in fighting impossible-to-control coal fires.

Yes, I think we have to allow some additional coal fires to ignite, but better safer technologies may be able to reduce the otherwise rising number of them. And we can’t reasonably stop all the poorly done poor people coal mines, as people deserve all sorts of ways to reduce their poverty. Just because satellite surveillance may show some remote underground coal fires naturally growing hotter and bigger, or about to spread into huge coal veins, soon to become impossible to control, doesn’t mean they need to be fought, because we don’t have to control everything anyway. Especially in unpopulated regions. (I can understand why there hasn’t been much effort to control the spreading coal fires, because it’s so pointless and futile.) So it’s okay to sit back and watch more coal fires naturally go on growing much too large to ever control. It’s a fact of life that nature remains still somewhat wild, unable to cost-effectively be tamed by man/ Nature naturally burns off excess hydrocarbons, and plants need the carbon dioxide anyway. Another reason for more coal mines, is to get at coal before it burns naturally from spreading coal fires, unless there are safer and better areas to mine instead.

Not just that, but increased access to electricity, and cheap electricity should be encouraged, considering the dirty alternatives. Electric and gas cookstoves displace millions of smoky cooking fires in growing cities. The smoky cooking fires cause the people respiratory problems, so let them modernize to using stoves and microwave ovens like we in developed countries enjoy, which are more compatible with growing huge cities and overcrowded shantytowns. Even if the electricity comes from cheap coal, it’s still better than burning fuel directly. Electricity energy is far easier and safer to control than direct cooking fires, more efficient, and removes the pollution release away from highly populated urban centers.

Increase electricity usage is also needed to better accommodate naturally rising human populations, more comfortably and safely. Many modern population accommodations, of the sort that now allows massive and densely populated cities, rely on abundant energy to run them, to pump the water to flush all the indoor toilets that help properly manage all the growing volumes of human wastes from cities around the world ever filling with people.

Now whether electricity is supposedly sort of a “contraceptive” isn’t really the point. What else is there to do in the dark villages at night, but make ever more babies? But electricity helps better manage/accommodate natural human population growth. It’s the latter effect I am interested, without making any effort to limit the natural growth of human numbers. Any true “environmentalists” should naturally object to people being pressured to limit family size by directly polluting their bodies with nasty experimental Big Pharma contraceptive potions and poisons. Anyhow, places where people have electricity, for whatever reasons, probably don’t expand their human populations so wildly and naturally as places that don’t, well except for inward migration from people depopulating the countryside. So there is both more ample means, and more time, to Adapt to the rising population levels.

If we want the cleaner cheap abundant alternative, wouldn’t that be more nuclear power plants? But the “environmental” radicals are still too opposed to them. Which then is a reason to go ahead mining more coal, and building more coal-fired electricity power plants. Because as we speak, human populations continue to grow around the world, and to properly support them in growing cities, we need cheap, affordable, abundant, and dependable energy. Coal is still a huge part of that mix, while so-called “green” electricity isn’t anywhere near up to the challenge in abundance, cheapness, or 24-7 dependability.

That is just my two cents.

They mention on several pages that they’ve done work with Freinds of the Earth.

Also, check out their toxins section and their children’s health section. It’s a complete list of all the bogus claims and unsubstantiated bs. They’re against flouridization of water (the same crap some have been harping on since the 1950’s, but still no actual evidence of harm). Crap about how Teflon is dangerous to human health (again, this has been claimed for decades but extensive study hasn’t found much of anything). Then they have crap about fire retardants and fireproofing material, plastics etc.

Demands for “renewable energy mandates” and so on are all across the page. You can also check out “health tips” for a laugh.

Yeah, this is not the kind of organization I will be caught dead endorsing. The site lacks any real hard science and is full of politics and fear-based BS. They’re cut from the same cloth as Greenpeace and FOE. Unfortunately they seem to be doing a good job at keeping up the appearances as a wolf in sheeps clothing.

“Nuclear power is an outmoded, heavily subsidized, high-risk relic of the Cold War that presents far too many serious hazards to justify its continuation. From terrorist strikes, to transportation of waste, to the constant risks presented by operating the plants themselves, nuclear power is, by any rational measure, far more risky than it is worth.

Yet as a nation, we rely on nuclear power for 20 percent of our electricity. The time is now, for the United States to begin to cut our dependence on nuclear power, and seriously fund alternative energy sources that are far less risky to our health, our environment, and our national security.

An excellent way to begin this transition is to halt the knee-jerk relicensing of nuclear power plants, and to take the time we have left under current operating licenses to move the nation to cleaner, safer transitional energies like natural gas and cleaner coal, and ultimately to renewable energies such as solar and wind combined with a serious commitment to energy efficiency. If these alternatives were subsidized at amounts equal to the subsidies granted the nuclear industry, there is no doubt that a transition to a nuclear-free future could be achieved over the next 20 years.”

That tells me all I need to know about the credentials of that pseudo-environmentalist group.

Thanks!

Lisa Frack, Online Organizer -EWG

        Mich said:

Fire needs air to burn. Fire doesn’t burn underground, retard.

The people of British Columbia would tend to disagree with you on that one, seeing as how there are two currently ongoing in that province. There’s a German one that’s been burning since the 1600s, and there are a bunch in Colorado and Pensylvannia, as well.