But the presentation by Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute struck me as really little more than a pep talk, urging coal industry officials to continue to deny that global warming is real and keep fighting any effort at all to limit greenhouse gas emissions.
"This is about a lot more than defending your industry and your state," Ebell told a couple dozen coal operators, utility representatives and other industry officials. "This is about the future of the American economy. You're fighting for every American here."
The coal folks, of course, ate this up. It's exactly what they want to hear. This is what they tell themselves. This is what they want the rest of us to believe.
But that's not all that Ebell said that the coal folks loved... he also made it clear that there's one other key point that the forces fighting any action on climate change rely on: Their insistence that the very notion that human pollution is heating up the planet is, as he put it, "a speculative theory that appears to have very little evidence in fact."
So what's Ebell got to back this up? Well, not very much, apparently. He said he has a more detailed presentation on "the science," but didn't bring it with him because he only wanted to spend "about two minutes" on that part of his talk.
Basically, Ebell stuck to one piece of information he said supports his view: That average global temperatures have not gone up since 1997, when the Kyoto treaty was negotiated. Specifically, he said:
It was no warmer in 2008 than it was in 1997.
OK ... can't we be done with this kind of cherry-picking of data? I mean come on. This is all too important for that.
We're all in big trouble if the science used to build coal mines and coal ash impoundments is on as shaky ground as their understanding of global climate change.
It's not a ringing endorsement for putting billions of dollars into any kind of research and development (like carbon capture and sequestration) to benefit such an anti-science crowd. This is one more argument to invest money in more promising alternative energy options--the coal industry should not be rewarded for behavior like this.
Until they get past the self-delusion, these new technologies may be just beyond their intellectual capacity.
