Year 7, Month 7, Day 24: Pore Lil’ Thangs….

The Tennessean tells us that Industry isn’t happy about POTUS’ climate-change ideas. Poor things:

BOW, N.H. — President Barack Obama’s push to fight global warming has triggered condemnation from the U.S. coal industry across the industrial Midwest, where state and local economies depend on the health of an energy sector facing strict new pollution limits.

But such concerns stretch even to New England, an environmentally focused region that long has felt the effects of drifting emissions from Rust Belt states.

Just ask Gary Long, the president of the Public Service Co. of New Hampshire, the state’s largest electric company.

Long says the president’s plan to impose limits on carbon dioxide emissions raises questions about the fate of the state’s two coal-fired power plants, electricity rates for millions of customers and the ability to find new energy sources. He also notes that New England has already invested billions of dollars in cleaner energy, agreed to cap its own carbon pollution and crafted plans to import Canadian hydroelectric power.

“New Hampshire’s always been ahead of the curve,” he says. “Does no good deed go unpunished?”

Long raised those concerns in the days after Obama launched a major second-term drive to combat climate change, bypassing Congress by putting limits for the first time on carbon pollution from new and existing power plants. At the core of his plan are controls on power plants that emit carbon dioxide.

See, Gary, in the next century, everybody is going to get punished. July 6:

Gary Long, an energy executive from New England, notes that his company has been proactively engaged in CO2 emissions reduction, but asks rhetorically about the President’s climate change proposals, “does no good deed go unpunished?” What a great question. Let’s find some other places and people to ask it.

How about Bangladesh, where climatic disruptions have made millions of subsistence farmers homeless? Or island nations like Kiribati, soon to be completely submerged under rising ocean waves? Or flood-battered Pakistan? Or, for that matter, Arizona, where a massive wildfire has caused uncountable damage and taken the lives of nineteen brave firefighters?

That many of the nations suffering most from the transforming climate have contributed nothing to the runaway greenhouse effect which now imperils their citizens (and in some cases their very existence) makes Mr. Long’s words sound less like a reasonable inquiry and more like self-entitled whining. It also makes Mr. Obama’s goal of closing coal plants sounds less like “punishment” for a New Hampshire utility, and more like a piece of responsible statesmanship.

Warren Senders