Sometimes, I'd like to slap greenies upside the head

Okay, full disclosure. I'm a closet tree-hugger. I've been for not polluting the Earth all my life. But that's where today's greenies and I part company.

(I, for one, am nauseated at the idea that developing countries can't use the energy they're sitting on to develop, but are told they A) can't use oil, and B) can't use genetically engineered seed. The alternative? Starve. Oh, well, say greenies. We need a lot less people on the planet anyway.)

Along comes a new technology with which I am extremely familiar -- converting waste coal into clean fuel. I briefly worked with these guys at a local newspaper at which I was an assistant editor, trying to get the word out.

Here's the deal.

Fuel distributor John W. Rich develops machinery that takes the HUGE, ugly, moonscape mountains of waste coal blotting our Pennsylvania landscape (and polluting pretty much all waterways with acid mine drainage) and turns them into clean fuel.

And when I say mountains, I mean it. They're huge.

So, no-brainer, right? Wrong. Guess where Jack told me the buck has stopped? Dick Cheney's desk.

Now, I'm no liberal, or "progressive," or whatever the totalitarians are calling themselves nowadays. Conservative I am, and always will be. But ... this is disturbing.

And I'm sure Jack himself is no "progressive." He's a businessman. We had a conversation about this, and the summation was, basically, "WTF?!" Jack's savvy enough to know if there's some lobby that has Cheney's ear better than his own. So it just doesn't make sense.

I'm thinking push is coming to shove, fuel-wise. If enough noise is made demanding that Jack's technology be put online, it will be. Pretty soon, the camps of "no drilling into reserves" and "no alternative energy except what we approve of" are going to have their backs to the wall.