EL+-+Coal+Miners


 * (1) Here’s how electric energy works from the carded state perspective**

Mark **__Daily__** November 28, **__2006__** [[|http://markdailyenergy.blogspot.com/...-in-dark.html]]]

__To make electricity you must turn a generator of some kind__. For example, in order to charge your car battery and keep your car's electrical system going you have to turn your alternator's main shaft. And, you have to turn it at the proper speeds and duration to get the proper results. You can also generate electricity without "turning things" by using certain chemical reactions, like hydrogen fuel cells and solar collector silicon wafers. That's pretty much it. __In order to rotate a generator you need energy. Either mechanical energy like wind and hydro-power, chemical energy like solar or fuel cells, or heat energy, like coal, or gas or something else that you burn or combust to make heat like nuclear energy or garbage etc.__ __2005 Data from the EPA__ ([|http://beta.blogger.com/(http://www....a/epat1p1.html]) ,__shows the following energy generation sources nation wide.__

2005(thousand megawatt hours)

__Coa__l - 2013179 - __49.65%__ Petroleum- 122522 - 3.02% Natural Gas - 757974 - 18.69% Other gas - 16317 - 0.40% Nuclear - 781986 - 19.29% Hydro-Electric - 269587 - 6.65% Renewables - 94932 - 2.34% Pump Storage - -6558 - -0.16% Other - 4749 - 0.12%

Some areas of the country have higher coal use with about 80 to 90 % of their electricity being made from steam driven turbines that are powered from the heat of coal. This technology has been around a long time. Natural gas became a popular fuel to make electricity in the 1970 and 80's because it was considered a cleaner burning fuel than coal and less expensive than oil or gasoline. Increases in natural gas costs make this fuel less popular today and most natural gas generation facilities tend to only be used to cover peak electricity demand that can not be met by base load coal generation.

Coal generation today costs between 3 and 5 cents per kilowatt hour. This rate would be higher if the subsidies mentioned by Public Citizen are taken away. Wind Energy comes with in 2-3 cents of coals kilowatt hour rate, as long as the Production Tax Credits stay in place. This is the cost of generating electricity and transmitting it to your distribution company. __You mine the coal__, gas or oil __and you ship the fuel to a power plant and you burn it to make electricity__. Or you turn turbines with wind or water to make electricity.

__Then you transmit the electricity__ directly to the load at just the right time to keep the lights from going dim. This takes lots of planning and coordination and lots of resources; people and machinery to mine the energy; trains, trucks and drivers to ship it and power plants, wind towers or dams, transmission lines and specially trained operators and technicians to keep the whole thing going smoothly. So, all of this is great for the economy, to a certain extent.


 * (2) Carl Sagan once said, "We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology." Now Carl Sagan probably didn’t know anything about science or technology either, since the Nuclear Winter Theory is about as credible as scalar weapons or cold fusion. But the point remains: the majority of those affected by intimately scientific problems have no access to political agency because they know nothing about science. This effectively renders democracy null and void.**

**//Coal Aff 2///**


 * (3) When I was little my favorite video game was Final Fantasy 7. Did you ever play Final Fantasy 7? If you didn’t then here’s a very short plot spoiler: the shinra electric company is raping the earth in order to power its big industrialized cities, the world is reduced to nothing but small crushed towns whose people have been used to mine energy and then left to rot in the wasteland that once was their home. It’s pretty screwed up, but, in the end, the earth fights back and destroys shinra with big monsters. The problem with our world? No big badass monsters.**


 * (4) Maybe it’s okay if there are no big monsters, because the power of an individual crying out for the truth always has the power to transcend the politics of the mass media and begin a demand for true policy change.**


 * (5) This is a poem I wrote about it—maybe that will express my emotions more fucking clearly.**

__TV swings strings out to us__ __Media knows only planted need poisonous in the hearts of man__ __Death become missiles portrayed absurd ways__ __Missiles missiles that sliced the morning dew__ __Eyes focused on the locus of misdirection perfection__ __But the heart always knew__

__We only only know the same dead__ __Under the capitol hill how many still lie beneath bleed and die__ __Like withered seeds planted beneath thrones__ __It’s all the same when we’re become bones__ __The matter done run through with its course__ __The lung sorta collapse__ __Elapse when and where allure pulls pulse__ __Spine sorta torn from the worn mind grind fuckery__

__We are become the spirit we of the dead__ __I am become my mourning this warning from I of the last dead__

__I am this divine heart that sings when the sun shines__ __A young Armageddon leaden upon my soul__ __You are our will you who art dead__ __I’m from there in the word__ __Told beneath the spirit the choking sun__ __The thing itself choking back its tears__

__And I will whisper from the heart with my last breath__ __I am still__ __The heart will whisper the people of this dead__ __Know I am come__

**//Coal Aff 3///**
 * (6) Sorry if poetry isn’t your thing.**


 * (7) In Ezekiel 16:49 God tells Ezekiel the following about Sodom:**

__Behold, this was the iniquity of thy sister Sodom, pride, fulness of bread, and abundance of idleness was in her and in her daughters, neither did she strengthen the hand of the **//poor and needy.//**__


 * I don’t care what your religion is but the holy //spirit of god// speaks through anyone who would strike down with //great vengeance// any who would refuse bread and water to the poor and exploit their weaknes****s.**


 * (7.5) A pause for puns A pirate walks into a bar with a steering wheel attached to his belly button. The bar tender asks him what it’s for and the pirate replies “ARRRRR IT BE //DRIVIN// ME NUTZ”**
 * (8) Alright I’m done with the bad jokes… The following quote will begin my speech of prayer and mourning for the workers in the mines. I appologize if you don’t like my style but for the sake of all that is right please forgive me my faults and listen to what I have to say.**


 * Ecclesiastes 3:1 through 3:4**

1__To every thing there is a season__, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: 2__A time to be born, and a time to die__; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; 3A time to kill, and __a time to heal; a time to break down__, and a time to build up; 4**//__A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance__//**; **//Coal Aff 4///**


 * (13) My father worked 20 years of his life as a construction worker. Destroying his body everyday for minimun wage. It’s hard for me to talk about it because when I do I also remember when I was six and he had to try and explain to me why he worked so hard that his back and his hands and his fingers were broken but they wouldn’t pay him enough money for us to eat. I remember when he had to explain to me why he couldn’t get it fixed. The eyes of a child do not understand health insurance because it is a greedy and wicked invention which makes no sense to a pure heart.**


 * (10) Compared to coal mining, working framing carpentry is a //cushy job.// Coal mining makes construction work look like a trip to //chucky fucking cheese.// Deleuze and Guattari write a card that talks about how the factories are prisons. If that’s true then coal mines are //concentrations camps//.**


 * (11) To me, right now, this is a touchy subject. If you’re not feeling anything, then all the better. That is part of the point. The coal mines are the concentrationcamps. I choose that metaphor //precicely//, because I sympathize with the apathy one might feel towards my speech. When I stood on the grass inside Dachau, on a spot where many people had seen their families killed before their eyes, I felt nothing. //Nothing//. Not some sort of cool trendy post-modern zen nothing. The plain old apathetic shitty kind of nothing. I was able to impose a sort of respect on myself for the gravity of the place I was inhabiting but mostly what I felt was nothing. I don’t think anyone can really feel what I’m talking about if they grew up knowing that they would go places and always knowing that they had a meal coming if they were hungry and always having a house with running water in the winter.**

**//Coal Aff 5///**
 * (12) There has to be some sort of remembrance though. For those who destroyed themselves everyday knowing that they were raising children to work in the same coal mine, who would have their own children, who also wouldn’t be able to afford to move away from the mining company. There has to be some sort of grace said RIGHT NOW for those who mined the coal that generates the light that fills this room. Because, even though they aren’t here in person, if you listen with your heart you can make out their screams, and if you look closely you can see their body in the light and the heat. We sit in comfort this moment only because of an economy explicitly designed to so use others as //slaves// for our petty comfort.**


 * (13) this is an absolute spiritual and ethical imperative: we must suffer with the oppressed in the world. Only by suffering with the cast-out and abject can we hope for a new kingdom of peace and righteousness, where we can truly bear witness to evil and come together as a people and elevate the crucified of the world.**
 * (14) It occurs to me that the other team might be rolling their eyes right now at my clothes made in China and Indonesia by sweat shop workers and I would like to apologize and say that I’m trying as hard as I fucking know how to. Sometimes I fast for weeks so that I use less food and I haven’t bought a piece of clothing for myself in 5 years. I truly believe that it is each of our burdens to bear the cross of the poor in any way we know how. I guess you could call that my framework for the round.**


 * (15) Remember from before when I talked abouth the technical process of coal energy production and then argued that the technical gap between the lay person and the scientist eviscerates the agency of the common person to participate in democracy? That same process is true of the average person’s ignorance of the technical process of their opression and wage-exploitation.****LIKE JOHN KANE SAYS :**
 * The principal way** **in which theory was to “grip” the proletariat was by revealing to it the true nature of its socio-economic position. This meant exposing the reality that underlay the illusory appearances of capitalist production and exchage, and showing, as well, how these appearances were necessary to the legitimation of the whole system and existed precisely for that purpose… workers come in a new consciousness of themselves as having being degraded to the status of objects or commodities, and in this very act of understanding they constitute themselves as active subjects who in their practice may abolish the system that degrades them.**


 * (16) This round is not enough to obliterate the suffering of coal miners, obviously. Expecting to break down any system of oppression with this round alone would be like expecting a pea shooter to make rubble out of the walls of jericho. I guess it’s a good thing that I’m about to read a plan text.**

**//Coal Aff 6///**


 * (17)** **We demand that the United States federal government ban coal mining and coal imports.**


 * (18) Sorry… I’m about to bore everyone, but I have to get all the technical parts of this 1AC out of the way so that the negatives know what’s going on. We will argue that we performatively solve our ethics arguments through educating the community about the position of the workers and making the former demand on the state. The plan itself is our political demand that the judge can endorse to uphold the resolution as a policy maker. We defend that it is fiated for the purposes of the round and will grant you whatever links would stem from the USfg banning coal mining.**


 * (19) There’s a reason we’re not reading many cards. This is a project intimately tied to the thesis of our affirmative case. It is an attempt to reclaim our ability to be policy makers. Just like the proletariat are alienated from the means of production of their labor, we in debate are told to produce knowledge and political agency using expert knowledge that is beyond our ownership and is intimately controlled or influenced by the ruling class, we are not permitted to own our own means of producing political agency and knowledge. This affects both our ability to be real competent policy makers and our ability to exert our own political agency. If we as a community want to be a force for change in the world and if we as a community want to be a site for true education then we must transcend the focus on borrowing the opinions of think-tanks and professional thinkers whose perverse job in the modern state is to //think for the public//.**

**//Coal Aff 7///**


 * (20) I end with a prayer**
 * holy father which art in heaven**
 * hollowed be thy name**
 * thy kingdom come**
 * thy will be done**
 * on earth as it is in heaven**
 * give us this our daily bread**
 * and forgive us our debts**
 * as we forgive our debtors**
 * but lead us not into temptation**
 * and deliver us from evil**
 * for yours is the kingdom**
 * and the power**
 * and the glory**
 * forever**
 * amen**