Workin' In a Coal Mine

I've been reading Barbara Freese's Coal: A Human History, which has been very insightful in all sorts of unexpected ways.

Today I came across something of a bombshell, buried about 2/3s into the book.

See, coal is a disproportionate source of CO₂. I don't have the book in front of me, but it's on the order of it provides 22% of our energy, but 34% our carbon emissions. That means any substantive cut in greenhouse gases necessarily means you have to do something about coal, and there's really only two things you can do: scrub the CO₂ out as best you can, or switch to low-sulfur coal -- which mostly comes from the western states, rather than Appalachia, where the traditional mines are.

So the coal industry has been fighting tooth and claw against the very idea of global climate change. They've been using very tobacco-like tactics: Financing "opposition" research; denying there's any problem with coal at all; etc.

It gets to be 2000. And Albert, Prince of the Tennessee Valley and Mr. Climate Change himself, is running for President.

While Florida got all the headlines that election, there's a state with 5 Electoral College votes -- exactly Bush's winning EC margin (271 to 266). This state has a Democratic governor, two of its three House reps are Democratic, and both Senators are Democrats -- famously so. It's also a state with a small population -- no city over 60,000 -- so the bang-for-your-buck, media buy wise, is very high.

In 2000, it voted for a Republican for President for the first time in yonks. Members of the Bush campaign referred to the campaign in this state as being a "coal-fired victory."

The state is West Virginia.

Many have commented on the irony of Gore winning the Nobel Peace Prize, almost as a consolation for losing the Presidency.

But it's very possibly more ironic than most realize. And a greater final victory. The very position Gore took that so threatened one specific industry it felt compelled to throw everything it had into a state with a potential margin of defeat... That advocacy has resulted in all the post-election laurels Gore has earned.

Pyrrhus, you have been outdone.

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EDITED TO ADD: akirlu reminds me:

"The crux of the telling as you told it to me, and miss here, is that the Bush campaign thought they had no chance in West Virginia. They were expecting it to go to Gore, and weren't going to spend any money there. It was the coal industry that spear-headed the spin campaign in West Virginia, and it was a campaign specifically targeted at jobs versus global warming. And the press totally missed it. That's where the real irony lies."

Kaboom

Bruce Schneier points to a fascinating piece at Wired's web site where the writer realized after the fact a tactic he'd developed playing Halo 3 was a form of suicide bombing.

What the heck, I'll pull the same quote Bruce does:

Whenever I find myself under attack by a wildly superior player, I stop trying to duck and avoid their fire. Instead, I turn around and run straight at them. I know that by doing so, I'm only making it easier for them to shoot me -- and thus I'm marching straight into the jaws of death. Indeed, I can usually see my health meter rapidly shrinking to zero.

But at the last second, before I die, I'll whip out a sticky plasma grenade -- and throw it at them. Because I've run up so close, I almost always hit my opponent successfully. I'll die -- but he'll die too, a few seconds later when the grenade goes off. (When you pull off the trick, the game pops up a little dialog box noting that you killed someone "from beyond the grave.")

It was after pulling this maneuver a couple of dozen times that it suddenly hit me: I had, quite unconsciously, adopted the tactics of a suicide bomber -- or a kamikaze pilot.

It's not just that I'm willing to sacrifice my life to kill someone else. It's that I'm exploiting the psychology of asymmetrical warfare.

Because after all, the really elite Halo players don't want to die. If they die too often, they won't win the round, and if they don't win the round, they won't advance up the Xbox Live rankings. And for the elite players, it's all about bragging rights.

I, however, have a completely different psychology. I know I'm the underdog; I know I'm probably going to get killed anyway. I am never going to advance up the Halo 3 rankings, because in the political economy of Halo, I'm poor.

Peek oil?

I've long been persuaded of the idea that we are near the point of global peak oil production. That is, oil extraction tends to be in a bell curve, roughly symmetrical on each side of the peak -- you go down just about as fast as you went up.

By way of environmental magazine Grist's blog, though, come this pointer to a curious article in the Financial Times: "Opec to seek assurances on oil demand."