If you only get your news from the mainstream media you probably surmise that the global coal industry is in terminal decline.

If you look between the rhetoric and the bloviating you get a totally different picture. Truth be known, the world demand for coal is increasing.

Coal has begun its long, slow climb out of a self-inflicted, deep slump caused by overproduction and low prices.

Coal will soon surpass oil as the largest global energy source.

More than 70 percent of the electricity in China and India comes from coal-fired power plants.

India is pushing ahead as rapidly as possible with its expansion of coal-fired power generating capacity.

Coal is the biggest fuel source for electricity in the UK. Coal produced 42.8 percent of the electricity in 2012, and 40.7 percent in 2013; a rather startling rise from 2011, when it provided only 30 percent.

The German use of coal to generate electricity is the highest it has been since the 1990s.

On July 17 the Australian Senate voted to repeal their carbon tax. The tax was devised to penalize the largest producers of carbon emissions.

Prime Minister Tony Abbott made repealing the carbon tax a central pledge of his election campaign. He argued that repealing the tax would reduce the cost of electricity and enhance economic growth.

After the tax was repealed Abbott characterized the tax as a “useless, destructive tax, which damaged jobs, which hurt families’ cost of living and which didn’t actually help the environment.”

Australia is the first country in the world to reverse action on climate change. Other countries have backed-off from carbon reduction targets, but Australia is the first to repeal an active carbon tax program.

In the May issue of “Coal People” Magazine Joseph Best, president of the Heartland Institute, referred to the new regulations that Obama, the Democrats and the EPA are trying to enact on the American people, as “Obamacare for the Environment.”

Best went on to say, “The proposed rules on electric power plants would cost approximately $51 billion a year and destroy 224,000 jobs a year through 2030.

“The EPA’s new global warming rules are based on junk science and would have no impact at all on the global climate.”

There is no empirical evidence that man-made carbon dioxide is a significant cause of global warming.

The Earth has been going through climate change for 4.5 billion years and there is no evidence that anything mankind does has any effect on it.

We all care about the environment, but not at the expense of reducing our economic well-being. Certainly not with regulations that have absolutely no beneficial impact whatsoever on the global climate.

We are witnessing the regulatory death of our nation, coming straight out of the Oval Office of the White House.

Thank God exposure of the politically generated global warming myth is starting to gain momentum as it circles the world.

 

Joseph P. Smith is the owner of Pyro-Chem Corporation in South Point and has worked in the energy industry for more than three decades. He can be reached by email at joepsmith@zoominternet.net