Alice Click's letter to the editor, "Awaiting Manchin's answer" provides exceptional treatment of West Virginia's Cap and Trade Bill (H.B.103), offering the voters their only sensible choice - elect John Raese to the U.S. Senate. Unfortunately Click does not go far enough with her recommendations.
This week's announced "Coalition to Elect Romney" provides a golden opportunity and momentum to complete the job by removing most of the entrenched West Virginia Obama supporting lawmakers that have fostered the destruction of the coal industry. Included are Earl Ray, 26 incumbent West Virginia House members, and two incumbent senators - 29 individuals who accepted the Obama and Manchin ideology and passed H.B. 103. Keep in mind that any passed bill results from a willing legislature.
Today's Obama's war on coal has nothing to do with H.B. 103. The impact of this legislation is yet to come and with EPA's recently announced CO2 regulation for new coal plants (1,000 pounds CO2 per megawatt-hour) totally dooms future use of coal - period, despite Rockefeller claims. No coal plant can meet this value unless it is equipped with Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CC&S) - a technology that does not exist and when it does will essentially double the cost of a power plant. Additionally any compliant coal plant will have substantial efficiency losses capturing and managing CO2 further increasing electric rates. It is doubtful that any utility would commit to such capital outlays. If any reader doubts what I have written here, check out Duke Energy's Edwardsport, Ind., plant - a project originally aimed at eventually demonstrating CC&S. Cost overruns and uncertainty has Duke abandoning any consideration to do CC&S - too expensive and not proven.
H.B. 103 tried to be "cute" and defined "Alternative Coal Plants" with a motive that small increases in plant efficiency would be OK allowing proponents to claim - meeting these requirement, "no problem." EPA's issued regulations doomed that approach.
One must keep in mind the 2010 election when gun-toting Manchin shot the Obama Cap and Trade Bill, but failed to turn around and shoot his own which must be now a high priority - repeal of H.B.103.
Hopefully the voters are better informed today and have now witnessed firsthand, the effects of Obama's plan for the nation and its consequences - that government (at all levels) knows best - better known as destruction of industries and loss of jobs. Hopefully everyone will be charged up, run to the polls, and vote for the very necessary clean sweep. It is now or never.
Augie Pitrolo
Washington, W.Va.
