From the home front, by which I mean West Virginia (have I mentioned I grew up there?), the excellent environmental reporter Ken Ward of the Charleston Gazette reports today, entirely unsurprisingly, that Governor Joe Manchin is against Obama's plans for cap-and-trade policies controlling greenhouse gas emissions:
Manchin said he told Obama recently that he's "on a different page" regarding Obama's proposal for a carbon dioxide emission "cap-and-trade" program. The governor said he's concerned the federal government will impose such emissions on coal-fired power plants before utilities come up with workable plans to control those emissions.
Well, this is to be expected. West Virginia is just about the only state in the country whose entire economy depends on coal. But there will be cap-and-trade legislation. Everyone knows this. Manchin knows this. So it's unusual for a governor to hop off the bus this early in the game.
But maybe he's got another idea. A certain unusually sagacious Kos diarist suggests:
Maybe, just maybe, Governor Joe might instead want to be, say, diplomatically hinting that the governor of West Virginia is, like, you know...perfectly positioned to broker a mountaintop removal mining moratorium in return for major investments in clean coal technology?
Something the new prez and select bigshots from the coal states could bask in the reflected glory of?
Something that might even provoke the President-elect to reflect, "Hmmmm. Maybe this meatball's not totally useless after all..."
This makes political sense. And God knows ending mountaintop removal would be a blessing upon the earth. The problem is that Obama would be very chary of endorsing this "clean coal" stuff too enthusiastically, because it would really piss off environmentalists.
And now we're getting word that Obama is prepared to name one Steven Chu as his energy secretary. He's an experimental physicist who has been working at Berkeley on technologies to reverse climate change (reverse?!) and a Nobel Prize winner. I know nothing about him yet, but you have to think that Al Gore signed off on the guy yesterday.
