TexasBred wrote:Big Muddy rancher wrote:I concur on Soapweed's view of wind energy but as one who live between two coal powered generating station I don't really like seeing what they have done to the land that has been mined. I will concede that they are doing a better job of reclaim then they had done in the past.
Since here in Sask, the power corp is a "Crown" I didn't care for they way they dealt with landowners and how the rules didn't really apply to them.
of the most beautiful pasture land and hay fields you'll see down here are reclaimed mining land. We don't have hard coal but a lot of lignite is mined and used to fire plants and the land reclaimed to look awesome. And the power plants run very cleanly. Yet at the same time it is not unusual to see half dozen long trains loaded with nothing but hard coal coming from Wyoming and other places to fire power plants in other areas of the state. (Even on Warren Buffet's Burlington Northern trains).

When we went by Gillette last week, there were 130 train engines sitting idle. One coal plant had just laid off another 150 workers, leaving only 100 working. We wonder, is Warren Buffet being subsidized somehow since not many trains are moving?
In the Casper paper there was an article on ex-coal employees applying for work at the prisons. Seems to be a correlation between
so many out of work and the crime rate rising. Who would have thought it?
Another article talked about reclamation. When coal isn't moving, money isn't being generated and there isn't as much money readily available for reclaiming the land. Wyoming has always done well with reclamation, even as far back as the '70's. We looked at a place for lease there in 1975 and part of the deal was reclaiming the land. I agree with TexasBred. Some of the best pasture in that part of Wyoming is reclaimed land.
What is happening in America is an atrocity.
I hope I didn't hijack the thread.
There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn't true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.