Photo credit: Photo Mojo

John McCain, the Republican Presidential candidate, who failed to mention climate change in his acceptance speech, who picked a climate change denier as his running mate, who won’t regulate greenhouse gases, whose energy plan is mainly about offshore drilling and nuclear energy is continuing on his failed environmental and energy trail.

While campaigning in coal-rich Pennsylvania, the Washington Post reports, McCain promised he is a “coal booster” and that he would encourage the export of coal to other countries. He also claimed that coal will “create hundreds of thousands of jobs”.

“My friends, you know what Senator Obama said about a year ago, he said he had not been a, quote, coal booster,” he said, as the crowd booed. “My friends, I’ve been a coal booster and it’s going to create jobs, and we’re going to export coal to other countries and we are going to create hundreds of thousands of jobs. That’s going to help restore the economy of the great state of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.”

In reality coal exports in USA is just a tiny little part of the coal industry. According to the Energy Information Administration, only 2 percent of the coal was exported from USA in 2007. And the coal industry hasn’t had “hundreds of thousands of jobs” since the 1950s. Now the coal industry only employ about 80 000 people. And that sum is likely not to go up.

Dan Weiss, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, said that “U.S. coal exports is a way for the U.S. to export global warming pollution,” and that “instead, we should be exporting wind and solar technology.”

But McCain and his fellow Republicans don’t care about common sense and they are now making so called robocalls in Pennsylvania and other coal-producing states around the U.S. warning that Barack Obama would “bankrupt the coal industry”.

The Climate Progress blog has a nice piece about this that I think you should read:

“Ironically, only the coal industry (and its conservative allies) can bankrupt the coal industry, by continuing to stick its head in the ground and not support funding an aggressive effort to see if carbon capture and storage can work.”

Today you will be able to choose if you want four more years of the same failed politics from George Bush and the Republican Party, or if you want some well-needed change and a way in the right direction for USA and the world. Make your vote count!