Lacking Rational Rebuttal, National Mining Association Gets Morally Offended
by David Sassoon - Nov 21st, 2007
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A few weeks ago, prominent climate scientist James Hansen submitted 59 pages of testimony to the Iowa Utilities Board, opposing construction of a proposed coal plant. The National Mining Association, which represents coal industry interests, was none too happy about it, and so they fired off a letter to Hansen. You can read NMA President and CEO Kraig Naasz's letter here. It's a really weird letter. He couldn't rebut Hansen's scientific testimony, so he went after Hansen for one provocative, metaphorical sentence in which Hansen dared to equate continued building of dirty coal plants with a holocaust of Earth's biodiversity.
Here's what Hansen wrote:
Coal will determine whether we continue to increase climate change or slow the human impact. Increased fossil fuel CO2 in the air today, compared to the pre-industrial atmosphere, is due 50% to coal, 35% to oil and 15% to gas. As oil resources peak, coal will determine future CO2 levels. Recently, after giving a high school commencement talk in my hometown, Denison, Iowa, I drove from Denison to Dunlap, where my parents are buried.
For most of 20 miles there were trains parked, engine to caboose, half of the cars being filled with coal. If we cannot stop the building of more coal-fired power plants, those coal trains will be death trains – no less gruesome than if they were boxcars headed to crematoria, loaded with uncountable irreplaceable species.
Here's what Naasz wrote: "The suggestion that coal utilization for electricity generation can be equated with the systematic extermination of European Jewry is both repellant and preposterous."
I can understand if the Simon Wiesenthal Center or the Anti-Defamation League took offense at Hansen's comment, but the National Mining Association? Seems like a pretty desperate gambit.
Naasz concludes:
I believe you owe the hard working men and women of both the coal mining and railroad industries an apology.
And especially to all the Jewish ones, Jim.
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