Posted on 07/31/2014 3:44:00 PM PDT by Oldeconomybuyer
PITTSBURGH —Union miners and others opposed to stricter pollution rules for coal-burning power plants proposed by the Environmental Protection Agency clashed inside and outside the city's federal building on the first of two days of public hearings on the new regulations.
About 5,000 union members, led by the United Mine Workers of America, on Thursday marched to the William S. Moorhead Federal Building chanting, "Hey, hey, EPA! Don't take our jobs away!"
A few members of a Pittsburgh-based union, Boilermakers Local 154, traded shouts and insults with some 300 environmental activists who stood on a nearby street corner as the march ended. "You're sending our jobs to China! Use your heads!" one union member shouted.
(Excerpt) Read more at wtae.com ...
Obama’s coalition appears to be fracturing.
Let the union guys start busting some enviro-weenies heads for a change.
I love it when the RATS fight among themselves. It is not about liberty, it is about each faction protecting their turf.
They had one of those “hearings” here. Envirowackos packed it. From the newspaper story I got the feeling it’s a kangaroo court. EPA has its orders from The Pen.
Well, union members, you sold your souls to get the alien bastard elected; now choke down the crap sundae he’s serving you in return.
The harvest from what you’ve sown can really suck, can’t it?
Meanwhile, the union fatcats who ordered you to vote for him continue to pull down their annual MILLION$.
HA HA. Well said!
“You’re sending our jobs to China! Use your heads!” one union member shouted
That’s the plan, genius. And you voted for the guy who’s doing it.
It was a democrat cat fight.
Hello good union brothers, bend over and grab your ankles, cause here it comes boys, aint votin’ democrat great...
The UMW is a ghost of what it used to be. They will be kicked to the curb. The Dem leadership knows there’s not a chance in Hell they will vote Republican.
Here's how media bias works. First the opponents are essentially labeled as those with a financial stake in the decision, basically driven by greedy self-interest. Second, "stricter pollution rule" is a benign sounding euphemism. The rules are designed and intended to put the coal industry out of business, it has nothing to do with pollution. Pollution is just the excuse.
Greed vs. benign self-interest is the media template for the Big Lie.
I really doubt W would do anything to stop it. He was never a friend of working people.
PS-Before anybody jumps down my throat, I voted for him twice and live in his old home town. It is just he did not have the guts to stop anything like the this.
At the core of all this, is the outlawing of coal as a fuel for power plants.
Coal is very high content of carbon, with a few volatiles mixed in, as well as a few highly complex hydrocarbons. It is these hydrocarbons that are at the heart of “pollution” when coal is burned for steam power generation.
There are a number of alternative ways of processing coal, so there is virtually no pollution. One is to convert the coal first to coke, essentially coal with all the volatiles cooked out of it. The volatiles, important industrial chemicals in their own right, are collected by condensation towers, much like the distillation towers used in refining petroleum, and virtually none are allowed to escape to open atmosphere.
The coke is then subjected to something called the Fischer-Tropf process, directing a stream of superheated steam at a bed of coke that is heated to about 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit, where the coke (nearly 100% carbon, now), is converted to carbon monoxide and free hydrogen, both highly combustible gases, and which are the actual fuel that would be used to generate the steam used in power generation plants. When fully combusted, the products are carbon dioxide and water vapor, “greenhouse gases” of which the water vapor is much the more potent and important to climate changes. The carbon dioxide is greedily sucked up by green growing plants, for the conversion to various carbohydrates, and the oxygen which every living thing that lives in its presence uses for providing the energy that drives life processes. Without these important processes going on all the time, everything would die, as the oxygen is used up, and the carbon dioxide could no longer be converted into the oxygen which exists NOWHERE as a free molecule without the presence of photosynthesis.
Oxygen is a highly corrosive element, the second most highly reactive element in the Universe. Only fluorine gas is more reactive as an element, and it destroys water upon contact, ripping the oxygen right off the water molecule to form hydrogen fluoride, and this substance can in turn rip gouges through most forms of silica-based glass. On the other hand, hydrogen fluoride can be easily contained in a container made of a derivative of petroleum, polyethylene, commonly used for storage containers on market shelves.
In the superstitious world of the only partly educated people, the carbon that is in coal, and carbon monoxide, and carbon dioxide are all conflated into “bad”. Particulate carbon, soot, is rather bad for anybody’s lungs, but it quickly adheres to moist surfaces, and can be collected with a very fine microporous filter. Carbon monoxide is a colorless, odorless gas, that is extremely dangerous to oxygen-breathing life forms, as it competes for the oxygen circulating in the blood stream, converting to carbon dioxide at the expense of the energy processes going on at the cellular level, and causing death by oxygen starvation at the molecular level. Carbon dioxide is the natural product of life processes, and signifies the extraction of energy stored in carbohydrates as the molecules of sugar are converted into water and carbon dioxide. Of course, the organism has to get rid of the excess carbon dioxide, which means everybody eventually has to exhale.
But once set in motion, this cycle of carbon plus oxygen, to carbon dioxide, to further combine with water, and form carbohydrates and free oxygen, then the conversion of free oxygen and carbohydrates back into water and carbon dioxide, continues in a most wonderful and self-adjusting cycle, so long as the process of photosynthesis is allowed to proceed at its own pace. The burning of coal, in and of itself, shall NEVER interrupt the cycle.
All this is a long way around to making the assertion that carbon dioxide is NOT a pollutant, and should never have been used as a “justification” for outlawing coal as a fuel for power generation, or the smelting of iron, or for the manufacture of literally thousands of important industrial chemicals (aniline dyes, for instance).
There is a whole big world of chemistry just based on coal. And we don’t know everything yet.
Love to see an old commie-led (Trumka) union turn on Obama and his marxists.
My god, even old lefty Cecil Roberts is complaining.
My how the worm has turned, a DUNE-sized worm, at that.
“Don’t take my job, Bro”!
Needed repeating.
Dumb UMW members, will they ever learn? Probably not. Suck on your hope and change.
Well the union dummies and their money elected him, so you get what you paid for.
True. Union power these days is in the hands of the government unions, service workers unions and teachers unions. All of these unions do not produce goods but instead consume wealth produced by true workers.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.