"Making matters worse, the Kansas Chamber had blanketed the state with slick “stealth” postcards that tout the bill as a jobs bill. "

Yes and the Chamber has also volunteered to be at the opening of the coal plants and will provide free colored filter masks with the "Coal Energy" logo on it. After that, you have to buy your own.

rshrink,

Point well taken. The rightwingers are only in it for themselves. They do not deserve the label "Americans."

logrithmic (Anonymous) says… "What we need to do is get used to warmer summers and living with heat. Our forefathers did not need ac did they?"

Maybe you, but not me. My house is not constructed to cool by convection. I will need power. I'll take yours and you can sweat!

Why isn't it on the table? We do all live in nice little boxes!

"China owns the U. S. and they'll burn coal for as long as they exist."

Likely not. They've already started to realize how badly they are destroying their own environment, and how toxic their cities are becoming. That's why their recent projects have revolved around Hydroelecticity, such as the Three Gorges Dam. (which of course proposes its own set of problems)

"They are ancient in terms of civilization and we are sooo young."

Except of course that their current society and modern civilization have little in common with their Dynastic past except for their tendency towards autocracy.

"We'll just go on happily buying the products they produce from their coal powered industry and smile as we beat ourselves up over the minute contribution our coal plants make to the global output."

Per capita we here in the US still produce about 5 times as much CO2 as China.

bozo: This is a comment section regarding a LTE in the LJW. This is not a technical publication. Thus, I am engaging in opinion, philosophy, and politics. I don't believe in CO2 as the main culprit in the climate changes that we are seeing.

Jim Hansen does. Jim Hansen is director of GISS. In this role he represents climate change science. He is a government employee who claims to have been silenced by the Bush administration, yet he travels the world delivering speeches in support of his opinion. He is engaged in politics while claiming it to be science.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/02/22/jim-hansen-supports-civil-disobedience/

Watch the film and judge for yourself.

Or read about his recent awards:

http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/news/20090114/

The military uses terms involving cluster... and circle.....

He is riding a wave of popularity that has rendered his ability to do science null. He is a "communicator", yet he is championed as a great scientist. Yep, science as fame. Science as political action.

Oh, Wakemup, science used to be reality. It included the requirement for the test. The experiment was the science. Today we have replaced this requirement with computer model runs. Not reality anymore. You are living in a world that has you hoodwinked into believing that it knows. It runs the computer, it has peer-review. The science of today always has an answer, whether it knows or not. The math ignorant masses buy it. It is a great place to be if you are a charlatan. It is a great place to be if you are P.T.Barnum.

We cannot get from here to the new “clean” utilities in a heartbeat Let us have the new plant and close down our dirty one.

Hunh? This isn't even on the table. The plants will be owned by two different utilities.

What we need to do is get used to warmer summers and living with heat. Our forefathers did not need ac did they?

God bless America!

Flamingdragon, you are bordering on being racist and should probably be banned.

You are the second rightwinger to call for banning people on this forum. You and the communist known as LibertyOne.

Hmmm... Perhaps the two of you should be banned so that neither of you ever have to suggest that others be banned.

I've got a solution for you Slabspunkey... stop reading the forums and acting like a baby. WAAAHHHHH!

God bless America (where we still have freedom of speech).

God bless the Journal World too - which permits freedom of speech on its forums.

No Coal plant in this area has anything similar to the ash ponds of the TVA. Apples to Oranges.

This is a lie:

http://projects.publicintegrity.org/coalash/

Check out the map. It states:
Plant Name: Lawrence Energy Center Zip: 66044 Total Coal Ash: 115.9 thousand tons

Read it again Slabspunkey: 115.9 thousand tons stored at the Lawrence Energy Center.

The largest environmental disaster in the history of the U.S. occurred during the last month of the Bush frat boy fuhrer administration. And it can happen in good old Larrytown too.

Not that you give a rat's behind!

May your God truly bless!

Yes, coal is a pollutant. It also runs our air conditioners and furnaces. It sounds to me like whole bunches of people just want coal to go away. I guess our air conditioners and furnaces should go away also! You know, Kansas is very hot in the summer.

We cannot get from here to the new "clean" utilities in a heartbeat Let us have the new plant and close down our dirty one. Let us also have an ambitious energy efficiency program that does not punish our weaker citizens. That should help minimize future needs for dirty coal!

Slogans will not get us through this. Thoughtful planning and consideration for all of us just might!

Ok, wakemup. You seem to be a guy with source to numbers.

What are acceptable levels of these pollutants?

These are emission amounts for some of the pollutants on a permit to install application of a proposed 750 MW supercritical pulverized coal plant using Powder River Basin Coal in Michigan. One can clearly see that lab monkey mislead people about emissions of pollutants: Long Term Emission Totals: Carbon Monoxide: 4,683 tons per year Nitrogen Oxide: 1,555 tons per year Sulfur Dioxide: 2,678 tons per year Particulate Matter: 880 tons per year Particulate Matter10: 806 tons per year Volatile Organic Compounds: 130 tons per year Lead: 0.34 tons per year (680 pounds per year) Sulfuric Acid: 102 tons per year SO1Boiler (Coal-fired) Stack: Arsenic: 0.92 tons per year (1,840 pounds per year) Mercury: 0.054 tons per year (108 pounds per year) Chromium: 0.42 tons per year (840 pounds per year) Cyanide: 0.39 tons per year (780 pounds per year

The need for 10 million gallons of water a day to run the coal plant was stated. The total circulating fluid volume in the cooling tower listed at 418,000 gallons per minute.

Devo apparently never heard of chemistry, atmospheric and environmental sciences, toxicology, air modelling including deposition and speciation, medicine or public health.

Sorry Devo-the political ideological fantasy-land stuff, logical fallacies and distraction rants don't work on someone who is reality and science based. Better luck next time.

Haps is defined as hazardous air pollution. Complete with epidemiological rigor. Epidemiological rigor is defined as that which supports your political goals.

Since science has been hijacked by politics, any discussion of Haps, or heavy metals, or other demons is political. Check out this list of cancer causing things in our world.

http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/cancer%20list.htm

Chemophobia and other neuroses have befallen western society. The west doesn't know how to manage their life, death, or risk in general. We are a bunch of fraidy-cats.

Meanwhile the life expectancy of people continues to rise. More and more people live into their 80s and 90s.
The world isn't going to end in 20 years no matter what Al Gore says. The increased chances of death due to exposure to life is being balanced by modern medicine. We live longer and die older and feel more guilty about it all the time. Guilt, that's the key.

Own up to your guilt, whackos. Eat those nuts and berries, go green, look for alternatives. But over all, you must promote guilt.

All you old hippies who rejected the old men with their black horned-rim glasses in 1965 have become just like them. You replaced the guilt of Jewish mothers and the Catholic church with your own version. Guilt, I tell ya. We must feel guilt. We must be guilty.

Leave me out of your guilt trips. I didn't buy original sin in 1965, I don't buy your "green" version now.

Labmonkey writes:"...unicorn farts."

You are mistaken, the clean energy lobby would never use unicorn farts. Farts increase green house gasses, the owners of cattle will soon be paying a carbon tax on their cattle because of the farts.

Unless of course you could insert valves in the rectums of these animals and retrieve the methane as a clean source of energy. But then PETA would intervene and citing cow rectal valving inhumane so were back to the start. Unicorn farts are out as a viable clean source of energy.

Flamingdragon, you are bordering on being racist and should probably be banned.

200 High Paying permanent jobs is a shot in the arm to SW Kansas economy. Electric bills will be paid from out of state, these employees, most of who will make 60-120K per year will spend that money in their communities. Some of the best schools around here are in counties with KCPL plants thanks to the tax revenue and money the company kicks in...not to mention electric companies will throw money at infrastructure improvement projects for good PR.

Someone complained about the out of state construction jobs. Of course they will be from out of state. It will take 5-10K skilled workers to build these plants, and Holcomb and Garden City won't have that. These people will have to stay somewhere, eat somewhere, and will spend a lot of money when they are in SW Kansas. I have yet to see a SW Kansas person on here opposing this.

Wind energy is good for peak load, but you need coal for base load on the grid....but keep spouting off your ignorance and keep believing that you will be able to blog or type responses on the computer using wind and unicorn farts.

You're being lied to about coal and CO2:

http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=5441

oh, this is funny.

Loggie calls Graham Kreiker a right-winger.

That's like calling eco-architect Sven a rational, generous person.

Log-

No Coal plant in this area has anything similar to the ash ponds of the TVA. Apples to Oranges.

"The plants will be built mostly by out-of-state firms that have their own workers who pay taxes in their home states. (The latest segment of new U.S. Highway 59 between Ottawa and the Douglas County line is being built by a Mississippi firm.)"

This is typical rightwing mentality again. If they had their way they'd import labor from China and Mexico, have them sleep in the fields and give them a trench to take a dump in, and force them to build the plant. Then they'd put them back in containers and ship them (or send them over their NAFTA superhighway) back to China and Mexico.

God bless!

No effect on human health here!

http://features.csmonitor.com/environment/2008/12/31/tennessee-spill-revives-coal-ash-controversy/

From link:

"...the disaster has brought attention to the regulation of the storage and disposal of waste coal....

Photographs show hundreds of acres of land caked in what looks like thick, porous mud but is actually water-soaked coal ash, the byproduct of coal combustion. The TVA claimed about 400 acres were covered in the sludge, said the TVA. According to the EPA, enough coal ash was released to cover more than 3,000 acres with sludge one foot deep.

“[The waste] turned one of the most beautiful places in this country into a giant slag heap,” Mr. Irwin said."

and:

http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2007-10-29-mercury-cover_N.htm

From link:

"Despite decades of government attempts to regulate it, ban it and erase it from household use, the poisonous metal mercury remains a threat to the environment and public health, especially to children and to women of childbearing age.

As many as 600,000 babies may be born in the USA each year with irreversible brain damage because pregnant mothers ate mercury-contaminated fish, the Environmental Protection Agency says. Medical researchers are just beginning to explore such mercury exposure in adults, which can leave some people struggling through life in a disorienting "fish fog." Nationwide, more than 8,000 lakes, rivers and bays are compromised by mercury's toxic effects.

Where is all the mercury coming from and can something be done to stop it? A partial answer can be found in the nearly 500 coal-burning power plants that supply half the nation's electricity. The $298-billion-a-year electric utility industry is the nation's largest source of mercury air emissions and the latest target of federal and state clean-air regulations."

and:

http://www.grist.org/news/maindish/2006/02/16/reece/

From link:

"Not since the glaciers pushed toward these ridgelines a million years ago have the Appalachian Mountains been as threatened as they are today.... Central Appalachia provides much of the country's coal,,,, Around 70 percent of that coal comes from strip mines, and over the last 20 years, an increasing amount comes from mountaintop-removal sites.

In the name of corporate expedience, coal companies have turned from excavation to simply blasting away the tops of the mountains. To achieve this,...each detonation is 10 times as powerful, and thousands of blasts go off each day across central Appalachia. Hundreds of feet of forest, topsoil, and sandstone -- the coal industry calls all of this "overburden" -- are unearthed so bulldozers and front-end loaders can more easily extract the...coal that stretch in horizontal layers throughout these mountains. Almost everything that isn't coal is pushed down into the valleys below."

Thanks to rightwing head in the sand mentality!

Make it a great one!

"The truth is that, if the plants ever get running, they will provide only a few jobs, unless we include health care workers that are treating the increased cases of respiratory illness due to the pollution."

What effluent from the Holcomb power plants will increase the amount of respiratory illness in Kansas, Mr. Kreicker?

Another ignorant LTE. I love how liberals, who know NOTHING about a coal plant spew this stuff. Two 700 mW plants will create 150-200 permanent, very high paying jobs in an area where the biggest employer is a Tyson Beef plant (which pollutes much more than a coal plant with today's strict regulations ever will). This will be a huge shot in the arm for the economy of SW Kansas. These employees and a Kansas company will receive money from out of state customers. Yes, we need to build wind farms, but they will not be enough to help an already taxed grid. I can understand if these plants were being built in your backyard giving you reason to complain, but the people of SW Kansas WANT these plants. And just ask Weston, MO., LaCygne, KS., Burlington, KS (Nuke), and Montrose, MO. if they would give up their plants and the boost to the economy and tax revenues they bring. I don't see anyone of these areas giving them up.

As for pollution, clean coal regulations require strict anti-pollution systems or the plants cannot even be built. After SCU's remove NOx's, Scrubbers remove SOx's, and baghouses remove partculates, the only thing comming out of that stack is water vapor and CO2. And don't give me the AGW crap. Why does it seem like everytime a climate scientist retires from NASA, do they suddenly say "i'm free to say what I feel and I am a skeptic.?" Vostock ice cores have shown that the temperature increases first, then CO2 increases with about an 800 year lag. And take a guess when the warmest time in recorded history was....the Medieval Warm period that ended in the early 1300's. The models (which is all they are, worthless computer models) most global warming people use too narrow of a time period of the last 1000 years when they need to take into account all data they have going back hundreds of thousands of years. If anything, we will be heading into an ice age in the next 1000 years according to data that takes the last 420K years into account.

There is no good reason NOT to build these plants.