Martin County Sheriff John Kirk had a concerning message for residents after funding didn’t come through: you’re on your own.
Given the level of cuts that had to be made, the sheriff warned residents to prepare to defend themselves, since the police department could no longer offer their services.
“We have always provided police protection but without the funding, we can no longer do this,” Kirk said. “FOLKS, LOCK YOUR DOORS, LOAD YOUR GUNS AND GET YOU A BARKING, BITING DOG. If the Sheriff’s office can’t protect you, WHO WILL?”
Part of the budgeting problem stems from a decline in coal revenue, which the Lexington Herald-Leader reported dropped from $34 million in the Fiscal Year 2012 to just $6.7 million in the Fiscal Year 2018.
Looks like Barry and Pantsuit made good on their promise to put a lot of coal miners out of work.
Coal is bad; solar, wind, and biomass are good, according to Green Religion. But wind and solar produce energy purely on an intermittent basis, whereas biomass, coal, and natural gas produce base loads. And there's a dirty little secret when it comes to the "burning biomass is good, burning coal is bad" mantra: in today's technological environment, given clean-burn coal plants, biomass is presently worse for the environment than coal.
Biomass electricity generation, a heavily subsidized form of “green” energy that relies primarily on the burning of wood, is more polluting and worse for the climate than coal, according to a new analysis of 88 pollution permits for biomass power plants in 25 states. The report found that although wood-burning power plants are often promoted as being good for the climate and carbon neutral, the low efficiency of plants means that they emit almost 50 percent more CO2 than coal per unit of energy produced.
Trees, Trash, and Toxics: How Biomass Energy Has Become the New Coal, released this week and delivered to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) by the Partnership for Policy Integrity (PFPI), concludes that biomass power plants across the country are permitted to emit more pollution than comparable coal plants or commercial waste incinerators, even as they are subsidized by state and federal renewable energy dollars. It contains detailed emissions and fuel specifications for a number of facilities, including plants in California, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Kentucky, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, Virginia and Washington.
Biomass plants are dirty because they are markedly inefficient. The report found that per megawatt-hour, a biomass power plant employing “best available control technology” emits more nitrogen oxides, volatile organic compounds, particulate matter and carbon monoxide than a modern coal plant of the same size. "The American Lung Association has opposed granting renewable energy subsidies for biomass combustion precisely because it is so polluting,” said Jeff Seyler, president and CEO of the American Lung Association of the Northeast. “Why we are using taxpayer dollars to subsidize power plants that are more polluting than coal?”
Why? Two words explain it: Green Religion.
Never let a few facts get in the way of dogma.
