CPAC = Big Crazy, At Least Where the Environment Is Concerned

photo Reuters

It looks like the darling of this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference, in what is an apparent flirtation with the GOP presidential nomination, was Rand Paul, the son of Ron Paul and, like his father, a firebrand libertarian.

            Paul’s message of less and less government has some staying power for this conference. The Kentucky Senator was similarly lauded at last year’s CPAC. As the way things are going for Appalachians, I have little hope that things will change for the better in those states. They can continue to expect toxic spills in their rivers. With a Rand Paul administration, however, that dismal future would be a certainty. For him, the companies that mine coal can pretty much do as they please, and he dismisses mountaintop removal by saying, “I don’t’ think that anyone is going to be missing a hill or two here and there.”

            Looking at some of the other things to come out of CPAC, it certainly seems like a lot of Big Crazy is going on there. Here we have William Peter Pendly, author of Sagebrush Rebel: Reagan's Battle with Environmental Extremists and Why It Matters Today speaking on president Obama’s fictitious “war on fossil fuels.” Later in the video someone in on the panel discussion dismisses concern or action on climate change by saying that there is a “prejudice against the man-made,” due to “human racism.” That, in essence, folks who are concerned about melting glaciers, rising oceans, possible worsening weather events such as drought, floods, and more sever storms, are only concerned because of their prejudice against the human race. Is that Big Crazy or what?

The Casualties In Coal's War on Us.

Rand Paul is keeping the “war on coal” meme alive. Meanwhile, increased use of coal in northern China is robbing millions of their lives. On average northern Chinese residents lifespan has been shortened by five and a half years, due to breathing the particulate laden air of that region.

            Published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the study focused on deaths during the 1990s that were caused by heart disease, stroke, lung cancer, and respiratory illnesses.  The study compared deaths from these illnesses south of the Huai River with similar data north of the river, where the Chinese government has been providing residents with free coal since the 1950s.

            Despite Rand Paul, who once dismissed concern over mountaintop removal as “missing a few hills here and there,” it seems that our use of coal extracts a heavy price. Men die in coal mining accidents, where they also risk getting black lung disease, which has been increasing in recent years. A geography of increased disease and death encircles mountaintop removal mines, and the heartland of this country is hot and possibly going dry from global warming, caused by our throwing tons of CO2 in the air, most of which comes from coal.

            Maybe somebody should tell Rand Paul that it looks like coal has a war on us.

Rand Paul: Mountaintop Removal Is Just "Missing a Hill Or Two Here and There"

Hot off his revival of the Senate tradition of filibustering for hours and hours over the administration’s foreign, and possibly domestic, drone strike policy, Rand Paul took the number one slot as their presidential choice in 2016 at the recent Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) held in DC last week.

When he speaks about mountaintop removal, Paul couches his approval of the mining practice in terms of property rights, which are, along with their ideas of “small government” and their views of the U.S. Constitution, one of the sacrosanct components for the libertarians' utopia. For Paul, if a coal company owns land, they can mine it any which way they want to. Of the destruction of Kentucky’s landscape caused by mountaintop removal, he goes on to say, “I don’t’ think that anyone is going to be missing a hill or two here and there.” And that’s pretty much it, when it comes to Rand Paul’s take on mountaintop removal.

            It makes my head spin that anybody who talks like this could be seriously considered for any public office, let alone the presidency of the United States. Is it that Paul has been so blinded by the vacuously constructed Ayn Rand view of the world that he simply believes that one of the most destructive mining practices the world knows is allowed because a coal company owns a plot of land? Or is Paul simply using the rhetoric of one of the extreme ends of the GOP to give cover to the mountaintop removal mining companies?

            A lot of folks at CPAC want him to be the next president. How crazy is that?

Just "missing a hill or two here and there." The mining operation close to Whitesburg, Kentucky, the state that Rand Paul represents in the Senate. photo from mountainroadshow.com

Todd Akin: Is He Any More Stupid and Insensitive Than Other Politicians?

This is apparently big news. I’ve been hearing about it just about any time I turn on the radio. Defending his stance against abortion rights, Todd Akin, the Missouri representative who is competing with Claire McCaskill for her Senate seat, said during an interview with a Saint Louis television station this past weekend that pregnancies do not result from “legitimate rape.” Besides the absolute ignorance of basic biology he displays with this statement, he’s also showing a great deal of insensitivity with the terminology of calling any sort of rape legitimate.

            So there is an outcry and calls for him to drop out of the Senate race against McCaskill. I tend to agree with the folks who say he should drop out of the race. A person who would say such a thing, whether or not you think that access to abortions should be restricted or outlawed, is too stupid to hold any sort of public office, from the U.S. Congress down to your local school board.

            But, compared to other congressional representatives, is Akin all that stupid? Despite some of the best science ever performed in the history of the empirical method, Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe denies that there is any evidence for global warming. As a matter of fact, he goes so far as to say that all the science on climate change is a fakery, a hoax, perpetrated on the world by mendacious scientists. This is a scenario that, if it were a movie, would contain thousands of Doctor Frankensteins in cahoots with a sort of covert Trilateral Commission working with a great PR department.

            Obviously crazy or really stupid, maybe even paranoid. Where are the calls for him to resign?

            Then there is Senator Rand Paul from Kentucky, a state in which mountaintop removal coal mining has destroyed hundreds of mountains, ruined ecosystems, and has been shown to cause kidney stones, tooth loss, diarrhea, learning disabilities, and some forms of cancer,[i] as well as numerous forms of birth defects.[ii] Rand said of the mining practice that, “I don’t think anyone’s going to be missing a hill or two here and there.”

            People are getting sick and dying, and as far as Rand is concerned it all amounts to “missing a hill or two here and there.” I don’t think much consideration is needed to find this statement stupid and insensitive. Once again, where are the calls for his resignation?

            I could go on and on. The list of things said that are stupid and insensitive is long: equating Islam with terrorism; blaming poor folks for their plight; classifying vandalism as terrorism; calling any kind of coal production “clean.” There is a lot of stupid getting in the way of real political progress.

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[i] Holzman, David C. “Mountaintop Removal Mining.” Environmental Health Perspectives Vol. 119, Issue 11 11/1/2011 electronic journal

[ii] Ahearn, Melissa M. et at. “The association between mountaintop mining and birth defects among live births in central Appalachia, 1996–2003.” Environmental Research Vol. 111 Issue 6. Aug 2011, p 838-846 electronic journal