$1 Billion for Obama buys a lot prole lungs.

Warren Buffett's 1 Billion Dollar Campaign Contribution

a cool one billion for the pro-Obama Super PAC Priorities USA Action.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/07/31…

@1 Good your stupidity never ceases to amaze me. Did you even read the whole page?


*Note: I made this up. The only part that's true is the amount spent so far by the conservative PACs (compared to only $7 million by Priorities USA!) and the fact that Buffett won't contribute to Super PACs on principle. I think it's mistake: a unilateral disarming that won't change anyone's opinion about the wisdom of billionaires buying elections.

coal trains = jerbs. of course, the entire enterprise is hastening the demise of life on the planet, but any jerb is a good jerb, right?

@2 I don't have that problem.

if we can't outright ban the coal trains ... can we at least force the coal companies who will be profiting to build overpasses on all the major streets in SODO? This would fix a lot of problems (not the coal problem ... but a lot of other problems)

The only place really "hurt" at that point is the Sculpture park ... but since they and their $$$ killed the waterfront streetcar I say fuck 'em

@3, I'm laughing out loud. Bailo, you are dumber than a box of rocks.

That's a big Twinkie.

Holy crap! Why can't they pile to coal outside the city in a field somewhere? Or a large hole?

I like to measure it by the number of dead kids and vets who die due to the coal dust from the tarp-covered train. Which is around 200.

How much is it worth now?

Coal trains should be in underwater tunnels, not people.

@6
We cannot force the railroad to build the overpasses. I have heard various figures, but they can only pay not more than 5% to 10% of a rail crossing improvment, the rest has to come from somehwere else. Some sort of federal law protecting interstate rail traffic from long long ago applies here

It is, however, possible to try and say that the company building the port, SSA Marine, could be forced to mitigate the costs of such overpasses rather then the railroad (which would be 100s of millions throughout the whole state, as this impacts more than just Seattle).

However, SSA Marine will be arguing hard that they should only have to mitigate costs that are related to the buildign site at Cherry Point in Whatcom county, not anything beyond.
Go to the scoping meeting and ask for the cost of the overpasses to be mitigated!

(it would be my hope that this sort of mitigation of cost would be adked of SSMA Marine and Peabody Coal as a condition of bulding the port, and that this would make the prouject too expensive for them to actually follow through and do. Then we would not have coal ports or coal trains!)

now for extra-credit what's the volume (at standard temperature and pressure) of the CO2 that will be released from that mountain of carbon? (hint: 12 grams a mole of carbon and approximately 22.4 liters per mole of some typical gases)

@4: Yep, I'm going to Godwin the fuck out of this shit. The guards at Auschwitz had "jobs". Not all jobs are created equal.

I'm only getting a pile 431 feet tall and 1304 feet in diameter. Barley taller than the Westin Building, well under the Smith Tower.

Right? 192,000,000 cubic feet? A cone with a height one third the diameter? V= 1/3 * pi * r^2 * h ? No?

Also. Am I wrong to think it's beside the point? Because it's not coming in one big pile, once a year. So who cares? But still, if you're going to make this argument, please check yr math cause I think it's not that big a pile of coal.

"Eclipse downtown"? You realize that the placement of those buildings on that graph doesn't indicate how far apart they are, right? Per Google maps, it's 1.6 miles from the Space Needle to Smith Tower. The pile on the graph is 1/2 mile in diameter.

Just imagine the gut level experience of having this quantity of coal driven across a large number of our most heavily trafficked roads and through the most densely populated regions of the densely populated Puget Sound basin. Consider that Golden Gardens, Carkeek and Richmond Beach Parks, to name but three of the dozens of parks along the route, in addition to Sculpture park mentioned above, will experience an increase in noise levels perhaps unequaled in modern regional history (for that matter, imagine the dismay of the home owners and businesses sitting on all of that expensive track-side water view property along the coal train route.)

There are far simpler realities than the weight of a mole of carbon or the finer points of federal railroad law to consider here. Though these subjects are technically relevant, they will never stir the blood the way the actual trains will as they quite literally, every single day, physically encroach on us in their many ways. If you really think about it, none of us will be entirely beyond their reach. The honest cost of the trains' full, short and long term environmental impact surpasses any economic benefit by such a margin that it seems almost surreal the proposal is being taken seriously. But for the federal mandates on rail right of ways it wouldn't be.

Cool! Does Christo know about this?

That kind of graphic just makes my brain go "cooooool"

@15 - It looks like you are missing a zero on the cubic feet. If a ton is 40 cubic feet, 48 million tons is 1,920,000,000 not 192,000,000.

How much tax revenue is that?

Coal Train mitigation are the solutions to Chris Hansen's traffic problem.

@20

Oops.