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Just making the job a revolving door won't help if PAC $$$$ is still driving everything, and there could even be justification for having someone stay on if they are doing a good job.

The root cause is having the wrong incentives which is why it is critical to strike down Citizen's United and get money out of politics.

Until we have elections that can not be purchased, nothing will change.

So, you don't think that many of the crappy politicians on both sides might not even bother if it will not be a career for them?

I don't disagree with you Mark about removing the massive amount of money going into elections. I don't know how you ever think you will get the people receiving it to vote it out.
 
Big surprise folks. Federal deficit increases by 17% per CNN.

I thought one of the big selling points on the recently passed tax reform bill was that, in addition to job creation, it would decrease the deficit.

But I'm getting old. Maybe my memory is failing. ;)
 
I heard 16% but whats a few billion dollars among friendly tax payers?

I agree with you Gordon. Hopefully we will get some accurate description of why. There could be any number of reasons though most of them make you just shake your head.

Yes we are getting old, and yes our memory is not what it was, but, we've been told the same thing by the politicians for most of our lives.
 
But our politicians are changing and not for the better.

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I just returned from Utah to see the Arches, Canyonland, Goblin Valley, Capitol Reef etc.. There is absolutely beautiful land there.

I also saw brand new oil pumps and storage tanks outside the entrance to Canyonlands National Park.

Trump authorized OPEN PIT STRIP MINING for coal by Zion National Park. This makes ZERO sense to me we already have more coal than we have demand for. Why create such an eye sore by one of the most beautiful national parks in the area.

Trump has opened 70% of the NLM land to the East of Capitol Reef for drilling and decreased the size of our national parks.

As expected the GOP is doing exactly what was done in WI. First drop taxes creating a much worse deficit than before, and now Mitch McConnell is calling for cutting Social Security and Medicare to offset this added deficit. It is exactly the 1,2 punch that I expected.

Seems like the rape of the US National Parks followed by that our our elderly.
 
It's funny Mark I never heard you bitch when Obama f-ed up our healthcare system or tried to stop us from producing any petroleum products trying to make us dependent on foreign oil.

My wife and I have spent time in many of our National Parks and love them. I will see what I can find on how much encroachment there is.
 
It's funny Mark I never heard you bitch when Obama f-ed up our healthcare system or tried to stop us from producing any petroleum products trying to make us dependent on foreign oil.

My wife and I have spent time in many of our National Parks and love them. I will see what I can find on how much encroachment there is.


Obama never f-ed up our healthcare system. In fact the ACA had many good points. The issue is that bi-partisan politics kept Congress from fixing the issues with the ACA to make it work better and instead wasted all their energy making lame attempts to repeal it. If they had actually worked on improving it, the country would be a lot better off today.

However the GOP only wanted talking points to complain about. They NEVER introduced a better alternative and when they finally had the ability to repeal it, they didn't because they had spent all their time bitching about the ACA rather than actually trying to find a better way to do things. What they did do was sabotage it, by making it much riskier for insurance companies to support.

They knew that they couldn't actually repeal the ACA because it would have cost many their lives and once it had been repealed, they would be blamed for the aftermath. Once again because they had nothing to replace it with and they would rather have this to bitch about during the election process.


Oil is where the GOP is completely out to lunch.

All that drill baby drill BS doesn't matter because offshore drilling is no longer even remotely profitable.

What we have done is found much better ways to process the oil in the Dakotas much more efficiently, but with oil prices way down even the oil production up there is down from its peak in 2015. We have plenty of reserves on tap whenever we need them and lots of oil rigs that are currently turned off because the price of oil is so low.

Obama did actually chip away at restrictions on Fracking while he was president and we are about to become the largest exporter of NG in the world.


Trump's whole coal policy is pure propaganda and makes no sense. The coal industry doesn't employ many people due to automation, AND the power utilities have been switching over the NG because it makes too much sense.

Natural Gas
1. Cheap
2. We've got plenty of it.
3. Once a pipeline is in place essentially zero transportation costs.
4. It's modular. You can drop in a new combustion turbine in a matter of months vs. multi-year coal boiler construction.
5. The biggest deal is that a combustion turbine can be spun up and back down very quickly so they can efficiently match load demands. Coal fired plants have to run at near 100% output and stay there to maintain efficiency. It takes up to 3 days to get a coal fired plant all the way up so they have historically WASTED piles of energy boiling water that is never used to generate electricity during off peak hours.
6. I know you don't care about these things, but they also burn much cleaner than coal fired plants.

BTW I worked with the power utilities for a decade, and it just makes very poor business sense to ramp back up with coal. It is more expensive, leaves a mess of slag and ash that occasionally causes serious environmental damage and pollutes the air even with bag houses, SO2 scrubbers and Nox scrubbers.

And if you are curious what a environmental spill of ash looks like. We had this happen fairly close to me in TN in 2008. I had a friend in the affected area. TVA ended up buying his home and the homes of a good chunk of the local city because it was unsafe to live there afterwards.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly_ash_slurry_spill
 
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Mark, I'll take exception with #4, on one of our railroads in upstate Pa there is a gas fired power plant under construction, construction started in '16, it will completed, up and running sometime next year.
 
Mark, I'll take exception with #4, on one of our railroads in upstate Pa there is a gas fired power plant under construction, construction started in '16, it will completed, up and running sometime next year.

They choose to do things differently than many utilities do.

Numerous companies like the division General Electric recently sold off and Siemens and a few others build Combustion turbines that just need to be lowered into place, connected to the pipeline and synced with the grid. They can be brought in by rail car to many locations.

Think of it as something like a giant jet engine that is manufactured in a factory.

Now if they are building a completely new power plant with grid infrastructure etc, that does take a while. What I was referring to was that many plants scale up by adding additional combustion turbines as needed. Obviously there is a point at which they either don't have the NG pipeline capacity, or the grid infrastructure needs expansion to handle the extra power, but the power plant itself is almost plug and play.
 
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Mark, I will read through it later, thanks. If there is no market for coal then production will cease. No one will mine coal if it can't be sold.

Maybe a better description would be that we have plenty of coal in existing mines, but there is nothing cheaper than open pit strip mining. Since the coal by Zion starts very close to the surface of the ground it is very easy and cheap to get. So they can tear up the virgin ground near Zion to get coal a bit cheaper which means coal production at other sites will slow down.
 
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