Coal Article

WASHINGTON/LONDON (Reuters) - U.S. coal exports have jumped more than 60 percent this year due to soaring demand from Europe and Asia, according to a Reuters review of government data, allowing President Donald Trump's administration to claim that efforts to revive the battered industry are working.

The increased shipments came as the European Union and other U.S. allies heaped criticism on the Trump administration for its rejection of the Paris Climate Accord, a deal agreed by nearly 200 countries to cut carbon emissions from the burning of fossil fuels like coal.

The previously unpublished figures provided to Reuters by the U.S. Energy Information Administration showed exports of the fuel from January through May totaled 36.79 million tons, up 60.3 percent from 22.94 million tons in the same period in 2016. While reflecting a bounce from 2016, the shipments remained well-below volumes recorded in equivalent periods the previous five years.

They included a surge to several European countries during the 2017 period, including a 175 percent increase in shipments to the United Kingdom, and a doubling to France - which had suffered a series of nuclear power plant outages that required it and regional neighbors to rely more heavily on coal.

"If Europe wants to lecture Trump on climate then EU member states need transition plans to phase out polluting coal," said Laurence Watson, a data scientist working on coal at independent think tank Carbon Tracker Initiative in London.

Nicole Bockstaller, a spokeswoman at the EU Commission's Energy and Climate Action department, said that the EU's coal imports have generally been on a downward trend since 2006, albeit with seasonable variations like high demand during cold snaps in the winter.

Overall exports to European nations totaled 16 million tons in the first five months of this year, up from 10.5 million in the same period last year, according to the figures. Exports to Asia meanwhile, totaled 12.3 million tons, compared to 6.2 million tons in the year-earlier period.

Trump had campaigned on a promise to "cancel" the Paris deal and sweep away Obama-era environmental regulations to help coal miners, whose output last year sank to the lowest level since 1978. The industry has been battered for years by surging supplies of cheaper natural gas, brought on by better drilling technologies, and increased use of natural gas to fuel power plants.

His administration has since sought to kill scores of pending regulations he said threatened industries like coal mining, and reversed a ban on new coal leasing on federal lands.

TAKING CREDIT

Both the coal industry and the Trump administration said the rising exports of both steam coal, used to generate electricity, and metallurgical coal, used in heavy industry, were evidence that Trump's agenda was having a positive impact.

"Simply to know that coal no longer has to fight the government - that has to have some effect on investment decisions and in the outlook by companies, producers and utilities that use coal," said Luke Popovich, a spokesman for the National Mining Association.

Shaylyn Hynes, a spokeswoman at the U.S. Energy Department, said: "These numbers clearly show that the Trump Administration's policies are helping to revive an industry that was the target of costly and job killing overregulation from Washington for far too long."

Efforts to obtain comment from exporters Arch Coal (ARCH.N) and privately held Murray Energy Corp were unsuccessful. Contura Energy, which emerged as part of Alpha Natural Resource's bankruptcy and restructuring, and filed for public offering in May, declined to comment.

A spokesman for Peabody Energy, the largest coal producer, though without a major export profile, said the United States was generally a "swing supplier of seaborne coal."

U.S. Energy Information Administration analyst Elias Johnson said the U.S. coal industry may now be better positioned to meet foreign demand because U.S. miners have learned to produce at lower cost, after coming through a series of recent bankruptcies.

"There's the possibility that the U.S. will become more of a primary player in the global coal trade market," he said.

But he added there are also plenty of reasons the spike in demand could be temporary. For one thing, U.S. coal production and transportation costs are much higher than for other producers such as Indonesia and Australia.

Because coal can often be transhipped from European ports before it is consumed, it is also hard to determine where shipments ultimately end up.

Johnson pointed out that some of the fuel shipped into Western Europe, for example, could be making its way to other places like Ukraine, which is having trouble securing coal from its separatist-held regions.

Trump said last month that his administration is offering more coal to Ukraine, but it was unclear how, given deals are typically worked out between companies.

Civics Narative Essay Signers of the Constituon

Narrative Essay

Minimum 2 pages or 500 words

MLA format with your information (name, teacher, class, date) single spaced. Title is your signer's name. Double space but do not "double" double space between paragraphs.  

Write your essay in first person as if it is an autobiography.


Write your essay as if you are interviewer using a question and answer format. Questions must be detailed.

Your essay:

1. Background. Born, lived, died, went to school, was married, had kids, and had a job.
2. Before: April 1787 and earlier. Important accomplishments. Tell me why, what happened, impact then. WHY were they sent to Philadelphia?
3. During: May-September 1787. What committees did they belong on. What was committed supposed to accomplish, did accomplish? Speeches given? Any part of the Constitution that is attributed to your signer? Where did they stand on the New Jersey Plan or Virginia Plan? Why? Where did they stand on the issue of slavery?
4. After: October 1787 until death. What important jobs did they hold after Philadelphia Convention? What did they accomplish? Impact of their achievements in those jobs. Judges, government officials, Presidents, governors, ambassadors, vice presidents, House, and senate. These signers, with few exceptions, run the country for the next 20-25 years.
5. Summary: If writing as an autobiography then have the signer explain how important they were and the impact they have on the U.S. today. If writing as an interview have the interview sum up their importance and impact.

This will be a turnitin.com assignment. Codes will be given out Sept 8 in computer lab room 808.

Watch for:

Fatal flaws -75 for each use (their/there, our/are, etc.)

Contractions -25 for each use (don't, can't, won't, isn't, etc)

Text speak -50 for each use  (i, u, ur, etc. )

5 stages of death by Trump

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/05/03/5-stages-political-death-trump/


A very good read

Directions for Editorial cartoons Due Sept 23rd

Find a news article that deals with your assigned cartoon

Read the article

Print the article out

Highlight the who, what, where, when, why (paragraph)

Be prepared on the 23rd to analyze your cartoon in class. You do not need to print the cartoon out. Then students will present their cartoon analysis to the class.

Committees the Signers were part of during the Convention

http://teachingamericanhistory.org/convention/delegates/committee_table/


Find your signer.

What Committee did they belong to?


What was the purpose of the Committee?


What did the Committee accomplish?
















You're welcome...

James Madison's NOTES

The proceedings of the Constitutional Convention were supposed to be secret. However, James Madison snuck in his IPhone and sent out some tweets. The link below has the speeches and dialogue that took place in Philadelphia. Find your signer. See what they said.




http://www.nhccs.org/mnotes.html

Gun Control Articles and Questions Due Sept 8

Print out if you do not have a copy from class

Highlight the vocabulary in the article. Define the vocabulary on separate sheet of paper

Answer the questions. On the article, highlight where you found the answer and put the number of the question in the margin.

The article must be turned in with the questions and vocabulary.

Reason

Policy Responses to the Roanoke Shooting: 1) Mass Disarmament or 2) Mass Disarmament

The New York Times editorial about yesterday's horrifying shooting in Roanoke, Virginia, is predictably lame, exhibiting the wishful thinking and vague prescriptions that characterize the anti-gun movement. "Easily available guns offer troubled Americans the power to act out their grievances in public," the Times observes. "The power to be seen killing innocents with one of the guns so easily obtained around the country proves irresistible as the ultimate outlet for an individual's frustration and rage." The paper complains that "guns are ubiquitous and easy to acquire," with an "estimated 300 million guns in America owned by a third of the population, far more per capita than any other modern nation." What is to be done? The Times does not say. "There are too many guns," the editorial concludes, "and too little national will to do anything about them."

If the problem is "too many guns," the solution presumably involves reducing the number of guns. Mass confiscation of firearms would require more than "national will." It would require ignoring the Constitution, including not just the Second Amendment but also the Fourth and the Fifth. Perhaps that is why the Times does not spell out the logical implications of its argument.

There are similar problems with making guns less "easily available." ABC News reports that Vester Lee Flanagan II, the man who murdered WDBJ reporter Alison Parker and cameraman Adam Ward on live TV, legally bought the Glock pistol he used at a Virginia gun store. "Despite Flanagan's workplace struggles and his employers' suggestion that he seek medical attention," ABC says, alluding to an employee assistance program referral, "he did not fail any of the benchmarks for purchasing a handgun." He had "no known criminal record," and he apparently was never committed to a mental hospital. An obvious response, recommended by Parker's grieving father, is to expand the criteria for stripping people of their Second Amendment rights. "I'm not going to let this issue drop," Andy Parker said during a Fox News interview last night. "We've got to do something about crazy people getting guns."

The problem is that, once you expand the definition of "crazy people" beyond the current standard of forcible psychiatric treatment, it's not clear where you stop. People who knew Flanagan during his stint at WDBJ, where he worked under the professional name Bryce Williams, described him as "unhappy," touchy, "volatile," paranoid, perennially disgruntled, and "difficult to work with." In retrospect, those traits look like clear warning signs, and they are in fact common among mass shooters. But they are also common, period, and people who exhibit them rarely become murderers.

"We can point to all the warning signs we missed," Northeastern University criminologist James Alan Fox, an expert on mass murder, told the Associated Press last year. "But they're yellow flags. They're not red flags until blood is spilled." Any law that tried to disarm people like Flanagan would inevitably disarm many innocent, harmless people.

What would the new criteria look like? Should everyone who is fired because he has trouble getting along with his coworkers lose his Second Amendment rights? What about people with a short fuse, people whose employers refer them for counseling, or people who make dubious allegations of racism or homophobia? Perhaps the net should be cast even wider, to cover anyone who has ever qualified for a psychiatric diagnosis (something like half the population, according to one estimate). When you think about the details, "stronger mental health screenings for prospective gun owners," as ABC describes Andy Parker's proposal, begin to look a lot like the mass disarmament that The New York Times would like to see. Neither is feasible or desirable.

 

Readability Score: 12.3

 

 

 

 

The New York Times

Killings of Journalists Bring Gun Violence to Dark New Level

It is an increasingly horrific fact of life and death in the United States that easily available guns offer troubled Americans the power to act out their grievances in public. This trend, dramatized in recent years by macabre shootings in schools, churches, movie theaters and workplaces, was taken to a dark new level on Wednesday in southwestern Virginia by a disturbed former reporter who chose not only to murder two journalists as they reported live for a television station that had fired him, but also to record and broadcast the crime on social media.

By the numbers, the shooting was routine for this nation — three dead when the gunman finally killed himself hours after walking up and aiming at a TV reporter and her cameraman, as they broadcast a routine live interview to their WDBJ audience. What was distinctive and disturbing about this tragedy was the staging, how he filmed it and how quickly he made sure to alert his social media followers to watch the clip that showed him aiming a pistol point-blank at the two innocents and then shooting them with repeated volleys of gunfire.

“I filmed the shooting see Facebook,” the gunman announced to his followers on Twitter. Many did before the grisly recording was taken down.

The questioning that follows the shootings that routinely scar, yet only occasionally shock, a nation grown hard to them include the question of motive: Why would he do such a terrible thing? In so many cases, and certainly in this premeditated massacre, the answer seems to be that, amid a mass of unfathomable grievances, the power to be seen killing innocents with one of the guns so easily obtained around the country proves irresistible as the ultimate outlet for an individual’s frustration and rage. In this case, the outlet provided by social media appears to have whetted his murderous appetites.

Many politicians will focus on the gunman’s troubled personality and try to cast this shooting as a summons for better mental health care, certainly not gun control. Yet that ignores a grim reality: the estimated 300 million guns in America owned by a third of the population, far more per capita than any other modern nation. Guns are ubiquitous and easy to acquire, as statehouse politicians, particularly Republicans, genuflect to the gun lobby to weaken, not tighten, gun safety.

We all know no change is likely, for all the social media grotesquerie. The woeful truth underlying this latest shooting is more mundane than alarming. There are too many guns, and too little national will to do anything about them.

 

Readability Score: 14.6

 

 

 

 

Readability Score: 12.3

Read both articles posted on izzit.org today before answering the following questions.

1. Define: grievances, macabre, premeditated, ubiquitous, per capita, genuflect, grotesquerie, mundane, characterize, implications, criteria, dubious

2. The New York Times editorial states that people committing murders in public is increasingly a fact of life, and says “what was distinctive and disturbing about this tragedy [the Roanoke shooting] was the staging.” Why do highly public shootings create so much more anxiety, for many, than the thousands of other murders each year? Why might people who otherwise feel safe from crime feel vulnerable to these kinds of shootings?

3. What is the Times’ explanation for why mass shooters would do such a terrible thing? How do guns themselves relate to the shooters’ motivation, in the Times’ view? What evidence, if any, does the Times provide for this claim?

4. How is social media related to the Roanoke killer’s motives, in the Times’ view? If this is true, should government crack down on social media? Why or why not?

5. According to the Times, rejecting gun control as a solution “ignores a grim reality” of “the estimated 300 million guns in America owned by a third of the population.” What conclusion does the Times want us to draw from the fact that so many Americans own guns? Why do they consider this grim? Do they think it is unfortunate that any Americans own guns, or just that the number is so large?

6. Is Jacob Sullum right that the Times is vague about what to do about guns? If so, does this matter? Why or why not?

7. Is there a way to drastically reduce the number of guns in America without having the government confiscate them? Explain.

8. Why does Jacob Sullum say confiscating guns would require disregarding the Second, Fourth and Fifth Amendments? Is he right? Explain.

9. What are some reasons people want to own guns?

10. What kinds of mental problems can justify preventing someone from owning a gun?

11. What criteria should the law uphold for determining who can own a gun?

12. Suppose we want to keep guns out of the hands of people with perpetual grievances, frustration and rage, to prevent them from acting these out in the form of a mass shooting. Suppose that we aren’t worried that this is unfair to aggrieved people who aren’t going to commit mass murders. Is there any way to precisely and legally define the kind of people this would apply to?

13. Why is it difficult to detect and act on warning signs before a mass shooting? Who can respond to warning signs, and how?