Where do you draw the line?

 The following headline caught my eye in the Seattle Times:

 Coal Quandry as State Considers Shipping Dirty Fuel Overseas?

A few days ago, the State of Washington reached a deal with TransAlta Corporation to have TransAlta replace it's coal-fired boilers in Centralia with natural gas-fired ones by 2025.  These two plants are responsible for roughly 10% of Washington States 'Carbon Footprint'...so...it's a good thing for the children. 

Of course, TransAlta isn't doing this entirely out of the kindness and goodness of their corporate hearts.  Washington State has pledged about $55 Million to help with the transition, as well as allowing TransAlta to make long-term coal and natural gas price deals. 

I'm not the biggest believer in 'Global Warming.  I do not doubt we are in the middle of some form of climate change...I just don't know how responsible we humans and our bad habits are for it.  And if I had to choose between increasing the long-term risk of 'global warming' and increasing the short-term risk of financial ruin for the State of Washington...well...maybe I shouldn't have gotten rid of some of my silver the other day.

Now...having gotten their way with the coal plants, the environmentalists are trying to go a step further. 'How have we really helped the environment if we are just going to sell all that stinky, evil coal to China and India, so they can burn it even faster and in a less controlled manner than we are?'

I'm willing to agree it's a somewhat valid question...welcome to the Law of Unintended Consequences.  What do they want us to do...leave a valuable tax-base raising commodity in the ground?  Get real!  Very clean-cut to me.  If you have something legal, that you can't use now, and that someone considers valuable, and they are going to pay you for it...you sell it.  Duh.  Fairly clean cut to me.

My wife had a slightly different view on it.  She tried to apply it the garment/textile industry, which was a horribly run(from the employee viewpoint) industry for a long time.  While government regulation made the industry safer for the worker, it also made it more expensive for the consumer...which is why some companies went overseas to sweat shops full of little kids and underpaid women.  My wife was trying to make a point that by supporting companies that use sweat shops, you are endorsing their behavior...and would this be any different than supporting India and China polluting the environment with our coal than us polluting it with our coal?


I could see what she was getting at...but while I am totally against abusing 
women and children(they have such horrible pictures from inside those sweat shops)...it's harder to consider it when those women and children live overseas...and even a horrible sweat shop job is 10 times better than the average employment for their area. 

Talk about self-rationalization.  Luckily for me, the people with real morals always protest loud enough for me to realize when I should stop shopping at K-Mart for a bit because their clothes come from un-pure sources.  

Even tougher for me to visualize than horrible corporate abuses happening to women and children overseas is the abstract of 'environmental damage'. 

So...all I really know for now is my line lays somewhere between sweat-shops being bad, and selling coal to India and China being a necessary part of our fiscal future.