Tag: coal (page 4)

I moved here as a child of five when my parents chose to live a less hectic life here at home, rather than their fast-paced life in a fast-growing Brighton.  The town  has one major industry, now called Carmeuse Lime and Stone,  We just all call it Calcite.  It is a limestone quarry described as "crushed and broken" by Businessweek with a deep sea port on Lake Huron.  When I was a child, it was called the "Largest Limestone Quarry in The World,"  I don't know if it still is.  Basically it is a huge hole, a man-made desert, where men blow down walls of rock using TNT, then use amazingly humongous loaders to load ginormous dump trucks that take the stone to the vast crusher to make small rocks out of big ones.  Why?  We don't know.  Our limestone was once used to process steel.

Decepticons working with autobots. Vorlons with shadows. Harkonnen with Atreides. Romulans with Klingons. Cats with dogs. I don't know - doesn't sound right. But such is the suggestion from the Macomb Daily. In the opinion piece, the MD says

Granholm outlined some very bold and aggressive projects she would like the state to embark on as she painted a bright future for Michigan in her recent State of the State speech.

Aunt Jenny, working harder than she's ever worked to balance the budget, announces cuts to her beloved education system. Then, shazaam! President B. Hussein Obama's stimulus plan forbid cuts to education.

If I were a distrusting kind of guy, I would say that Aunt Jenny knew she was getting this money from the feds all along so she could act like the tough-minded budget cutter. It makes her look like she's actually working, and yet her lackeys at the MEA don't suffer any consequences.

If I were not the trusting sort, of course.

I wrote about the opinion MI AG Mike Cox made yesterday basically telling Governor Granholm that she can't just do whatever she wants. Specifically, that she exceeded her statutory authority in having the DEQ do things well beyond its charter. Like predict the energy mix in the future. In fact, I pointed out this quote in a prior post (Scrooge takes away Michigan's lump of coal! ) that was made by Russ Harding, former director of the Michigan DEQ:

Requiring the DEQ to make critical decisions about Michigan's future energy mix is a recipe for stagnation or worse.

Maybe the environitwits can think of this as "investing in our decaying infrastructure." You know - "creating jobs." There! Is that better now?

No kidding! I posted on this topic just 3 days ago (Scrooge takes away Michigan's lump of coal! ). In that post, I also pointed out Russ Harding, former director of the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality, who wrote an op-ed in the freep that actually defends the approving of new coal power plants. This excerpt is from that op-ed:

I was director of the DEQ for nearly eight years and can testify that the agency is ill-equipped to consider factors other than environmental ones. Requiring the DEQ to make critical decisions about Michigan's future energy mix is a recipe for stagnation or worse.