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I appreciate the chance to come and speak with you today and lead a discussion.
I’m not an expert on coal, or science, or climate change, or anything.
I did read and enjoy the book and looking forward to asking you what you thought about it.
OK so I’ve got this image on the screen and again I don’t want to take very long showing you this,
but I think it’s kind of interesting.
This is a coal fired power plant.
It’s the Merom Generating Station in Merom Station, Indiana.
If you back out a little, a little bit more, you can see that there’s a town here.
This is the town of Sullivan, Indiana.
It’s six miles away from this power plant, and it’s of interest to me because it’s my hometown.
So this is a part of the world that I’m familiar with.
If you come down here, let’s see it’s a little harder to do this,
Can you see that patch right there?
Let me give you one guess what that is.
(other voices)
Nope, you used up your one guess, but as we come in closer you’re going to be able to tell,
because there’s going to be a tell tale clue here in a second.
It’s a coal mine.
The scale of the coal mine because we see that thing down in there
and we think, “Oh that’s a crane,” but that’s not a crane,
that’s a dragline, that is one of the biggest pieces of equipment in the world.
That dwarfs any crane you’d ever see in your life.
That’s more like the size of an ordinary construction crane.
That’s a huge dragline.
This is high sulfur coal in Indiana.
This is part of that big, Goodell mainly talks about Illinois, but that big coal field in Illinois
drifts over into western Indiana, so this is on the very tip of that in western Indiana where I’m from.
Growing up, I knew very few miners, I certainly had no friends in high school
who went on to be miners or anything like that,
so it’s a revelation really to read this book and discover that it’s back,
and then to go online and discover not only is it back in West Virginia or Wyoming,
but it’s back even in sort of out of the way places like western Indiana.
They’re mining coal in a big way and getting ready to do it even more.
What were the big striking pieces of information or surprising things
that struck you when you were reading this book?
For me, it was just that sense that coal is back
and we’re not just talking about Wyoming and Montana,
we’re talking about Illinois, and Indiana, and Pennsylvania, and West Virgina, and Ohio,
and apparently Texas too.
We got ourselves into an over consumption mode
and that over consumption process has set us up on a track
whether or not coal is, I mean taking coal out of the picture.
Just the whole over consumption process isn’t a sustainable activity
on the part of the world, particularly when we look at other parts of the world doing the same thing we’re doing.
I mean if we’re a little part of the world doing it, well you know it’s ok,
but the rest of the world, how could we let them have those same access to things,
and it strikes me really strongly right now because my, I mentioned this to somebody else,
my son is coming home tomorrow, from two years in the peace corp in west Africa,
and yet when you look at the capacity of the individuals in Mauritania (Africa)
to interact with and be a part of the world at large,
their lack of access to dependable energy and resources
impacts their capacity for education, for world promise,
for vision for themselves, for moving forward, all that sort of stuff,
and so it’s not an easy kind of, it’s not all luxury,
but it is a change in expectation across time.
I sort of read this thing with the big question of what would I want
a new student at UNT to take away from this exercise,
which, I suppose is the point of having the book anyway, right.
So what’s the big sort of thing, so I sort of kept kind of letting that be the lens
through which I viewed the book and I,
The one thing I took away from that was the issue is how do you transition
from this thing that you believe is really not appropriate, you know it’s really devastating,
it’s going to be devastating to the world, to this new thing that will be better,
and it’s the transitional piece of it that’s going to be the hardest part to work on.
So as a message to someone who’s just beginning college, that’s probably not a bad one to talk about,
because you know they’re part of the transition, I mean we’re all part of the transition,
but you know there they are poised to begin this educational journey.
You know, they don’t know what they’re going to be yet and that stuff.
That being a part of the transition might be a very cool jumping off point for a discussion.
They are going to bare the brunt.
That’s the other thing, they’re going to pay the price on the back end you know if we don’t solve the issue.
And we’ll be the innovators that bring about the beginning of those changes going forward.
The United States has technology, has an educated work force, has a lot of capacity
help make that bridge and it’s in our economic best interest to do that.
That could be our next, as a nation, our next movement,
So he (Goodell) takes a little bit of a almost parochial view on behalf of the crisis of the world.
So it really puts us as a nation in an interesting place,
both for our own good, for the world’s good, for how we can take advantage of our capacity to make a difference,
and as you were saying, for this coming generation of scholars
to be a turning point for world history in a way that many generations don’t have the opportunity to be.
Part of this book would be to bring out, how do you discern where your information is coming from,
and what would that mean to you? What is the other side?
I think part of being an educated citizen is always playing devil’s advocate,
and yes, I mean I’m looking at this going, “I don’t think much of big coal,”
but do I know enough about the other side of the story to be educated enough
to say that this is what I believe.
I think you’re absolutely right, I mean no one would ever want one book,
no matter what book it is to be the only source of information they have
about a really controversial topic,
and you know we’re taking steps to be sure that the website that we have for this project
has links to various kinds of points of view.
Students who really become involved in the over all project
are certainly going to have ample opportunities to sort of see
different sides and hear different voices about the project.
Are there particular places in the book that seem especially persuasive,
or particular places in the book that you kind of wandered, and didn’t think was as persuasive?
You mentioned the antidotes and I think that is what is compelling in the book,
is the ability to have it be us instead of them,
and if you look at most of our environmental policies, it’s them.
If you look at NAFTA, let’s tell Mexico to clean up their air.
When we were at their stage of economic development, we didn’t clean up our air,