The skewing of facts, slander, and an unbelievably hostile approach are often combined by the Lexington Herald-Leader (Lexington, Ky.) editors to construct their front-page above-the-fold offerings. An example appeared in the issue of 08 December. Under the headline VERDICT ON EMISSIONS was a picture of the E.W. Brown Electricity Generating Station located some 30 minutes or so from Lexington. Predictably, the picture included a magnificent cloud – albeit white and apparently little more than steam – billowing forth, though strangely not from the smokestacks, from which nothing seemed to be emanating, even though the plant burns 1.5 million tons of coal per year.
The paper was celebrating the fact that the EPA, with the Obama administration unlikely ever to get cap-and-trade legislation passed in the Senate, has been charged with regulating everything involving CO2 by bureaucratic fiat. This amounts to the regulating of virtually everything, though human exhaling – largely CO2 – may escape being restrained, unless, of course, the EPA decides that people should take turns breathing, or perhaps the new health-care “death commissions” will mandate that old codgers or other non-productive citizens may no longer pollute the air by continuing to live and spew pollutants.
The irony lies in the fact that H-L reporters have done a terrific job in recent years by exposing government and quasi-government entities that are steeped in corruption, therefore waking the proper agencies and possibly honest officials from their slumbers and goading them into making corrections and demanding accountability to the taxpayers, whose money they have so freely stolen/wasted. Indictments have already been advanced and some perpetrators are probably looking forward to hard time.
The reporters, however, don’t make up the paper’s composition. The news editors apparently lack the freedom of reporters to just handle...well, just news. Rather, they seem hamstrung by the editorial policies of the paper, a McClatchy publication, meaning that they use the News departments of the paper to advance the paper’s ultra-liberal editorial agenda. Thus, the picture of a steam plant with a lot of billowing steam connected to an account denoting pollution would naturally fit the bill.
The E.W. Brown Plant belongs to Kentucky Utilities, which in turn belongs to a British outfit called E.ON.US. This is from the KU web-site: “KU's power generating system consists primarily of five generating stations - Ghent in Carroll County, Tyrone in Woodford County, E.W. Brown in Mercer County and Green River in Muhlenberg County. All meet or exceed the Clean Air Act requirements applicable in the year 2000.” To get an idea of how the largest of the plants (Ghent) pollutes, consider this: “In late 1994, a scrubber system was installed at Ghent Unit #1 and reduced sulfur dioxide emissions by at least 90%-from approximately 80,000 tons per year to less than 8,000 tons per year.”
Also about Ghent: “Each of the generating units is equipped with electrostatic precipitators designed to remove dust from the gas stream that results from burning coal.” This refers to the Tyrone Plant: “Electrostatic precipitators and other environmental controls have been added to ensure compliance with air and water quality standards.” This refers to the Green River Plant: “In 1974, more than 25 years ago, the company's first commercial scrubber was installed at the Green River Station to clean the emissions from Units 1 and 2. The scrubber removes over 90% of the sulfur dioxide from the flue gas associated with burning coal.”
Modifications were made at the E.W. Brown plant in 1997 that violated some government controls, so KU is now in the process of spending $135 million on its entire system with regard to pollution controls, all this even though the system was in compliance in 2000, according to its claim. The point: The EPA has done quite enough lately with respect to the E.W. Brown Plant and the entire KU system.
This is from the Kentucky Public Service Commission, 20 June 2005: “The new scrubbers at KU’s Brown and Ghent plants are the most expensive of the projects, with an estimated total cost of nearly $660 million. Three scrubbers will be built at the Ghent plant, each serving a single generating unit. A single scrubber at the Brown plant will serve three units. When completed by 2009, they will reduce annual sulfur dioxide emissions by 110,000 tons.” Get the picture. KU was deep into EPA constrictions four years ago. The “regulation highway” has no ending and every new regulation increases the citizen’s cost.
The supreme irony lies in the fact that manmade climate-change is probably the greatest worldwide social hoax in history. Top scientists and climatologists have been irrefutably proving this, not to mention the fact that the backbone of the most recent UN-IPCC report instigating all these regulations has now been exposed as a gigantic fraud. Al Gore has even canceled his appearance at the current climate clambake in Copenhagen, in anticipation of which 3,000 people had already coughed up $3,600,000 to shake his hand.
The paper’s account as a news item was not written by its reporters; rather, it was an offering of the Associated Press, an organization just as liberal as the H-L. The editors decided to editorialize with it, and more’s the journalistic pity. There should have been some balance but, of course, that wouldn’t have advanced the agenda.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
No comments:
Post a Comment