March Issue of National Geographic shows the diff between Rich and Poor

One article highlights how the coal (energy) companies are blowing mountaintops off and destroying rural West Virginia...the people there are left with a scarred landscape and contaminated tap water.

Another article at the back shows how the grand dames of Houston's elite are getting ready to fight it out once some dried up old prune decides to vacate the social scene...These are the well heeled monied families who generally own the energy companies...

I don't know if I am the only one who notices stuff like this but it just got me burning up...

http://www7.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0603/feature4/index.html

Get a taste of what awaits you in print from this compelling excerpt.

On a scorching August day in southwestern Indiana, the giant Gibson generating station is running flat out. Its five 180-foot-high (50-meter-high) boilers are gulping 25 tons of coal each minute, sending thousand-degree steam blasting through turbines that churn out more than 3,000 megawatts of electric power, 50 percent more than Hoover Dam. The plant's cooling system is struggling to keep up, and in the control room warnings chirp as the exhaust temperature rises.

But there's no backing off on a day like this, with air conditioners humming across the Midwest and electricity demand close to record levels. Gibson, one of the biggest power plants in the country, is a mainstay of the region's electricity supply, pumping enough power into the grid for three million people. Stepping from the sweltering plant into the air-conditioned offices, Angeline Protogere of Cinergy, the Cincinnati-based utility that owns Gibson, says gratefully, "This is why we're making all that power."

Next time you turn up the AC or pop in a DVD, spare a thought for places like Gibson and for the grimy fuel it devours at the rate of three 100-car trainloads a day. Coal-burning power plants like this one supply the United States with half its electricity. They also emit a stew of damaging substances, including sulfur dioxide—a major cause of acid rain—and mercury. And they gush as much climate-warming carbon dioxide as America's cars, trucks, buses, and planes combined.

Here and there, in small demonstration projects, engineers are exploring technologies that could turn coal into power without these environmental costs. Yet unless utilities start building such plants soon—and lots of them—the future is likely to hold many more traditional stations like Gibson.

Get the whole story in the pages of National Geographic magazine.

http://www7.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0603/feature8/index.html

Yet this improbable madness is currently the talk of Houston's showiest neighborhood. Oil and natural gas businesses may be thriving again, and local construction companies may be profiting handsomely from the war in Iraq, but the real concern among a certain crowd—young, female, and rich—is who will succeed La Lynn if and when she decides to abdicate. "It's an aggressive she-wolf campaign," says a friend who knows her way around the River Oaks Country Club.



Granted it doesn't list coal robber barons...but mark my words...some of them live there too...

The rich should teach their children a bit more about history. It's gonna get ugly for them soon.

when I read about how some people can't get potable drinking water due to coal mining and yet see a energy heiress talking about building a gondola for her swimming pool...I want to get my pitchfork...