SCOTTIE WESTFALL: Climate Change

I'm sure it tore you up to publish that 'science via Glenn Beck' post on global warming. Fox News has a lot of people fooled.

My dad was listening to that bloated gasbag Rush Limbaugh the other day. He was doing an analysis on global warming, which was even more crude than that one. He said that global warming was a myth because the bible says that it will reward men for being industrious. Thus, if we make our economy grow and grow and grow, God won't destroy us.

I'm going to not say anything in terms of comments, because I respect you too much.

However, I'm sure that you're going to get loads of comments on it.

I live in one of the main coal mining states in the United States. All of the electricity for my state is generated from coal-burning power plants.

And the coal itself is mined by tearing off the mountain top and putting it in the valley, leaving a lunar landscape though much of the southern part of West Virginia.

The people are poor because there are no opportunities. The coal severance taxes are very low, so they cannot use that wealth to fund good schools, built good transportation infrastructure, or develop a good tourism industry. While the people are poor, the coal company executives live like kings. They buy politicians and judges so they can continue doing awful things to people and the environment. West Virginia has almost no campaign finance laws in its state elections. As a result, a few wealthy individuals control virtually everything.

After the Civil War, West Virginia was a fully-fledged state, which opened itself up to coal, timber, and oil and natural gas speculators, who approached poor farmers who had lost nearly everything in the war. They offered them some crumbs for the rights to the timber and the royalties to the gas, oil, and coal. Poor people on the very edge of existence will take what they can get, so they took it, not fully understanding what the full worth of their natural resources were.

And the rest has been history.

We've been told our whole lives that unless the coal companies do well, West Virginia will starve. And so the people would rather be hewers of wood and drawers of water for these parasitic corporations. Climate change denial is now the state religion here.

I'm very sorry that people don't accept the reality of climate change. I can tell you that the winters here are much milder than when I was a boy, and my grandparents once knew of winters in which the snow fell in November and didn't melt until the end of March. Now, you have to go to Northern New England to find winters like this.

For more information:
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/11/i-read-through-160000000-bytes-of.html