Scott Walker willing to balance Human Lives with Cheaper Coal Energy.

While Scott Walker tries to create a manufacturing renaissance in Wisconsin, he's also working on retaining our retaining our reliance on coal. Think of Wisconsin as a "retro-50's" playground for old-fart corporate dinosaurs clinging to the past.

But what makes Walker's coal fired future so bizarre is what he's willing to "balance" out with coal: human life. Personally, that's not even a question, or shouldn't be anyway.

Coal or combined coal/gas make up the majority of Wisconsin's power plants ...Scott Walker rang alarm bells saying customer rates will go up as emission levels go down, calling the EPA regs a chain saw to the economy. 

The writings on the wall...but: Despite the rapid closing of coal mines nationwide, Walker's stubborn insistence to stay with coal is just setting us up for the eventual future cost of catching up to the new green energy marketplace. At least that spending won't be on Walker's watch, and that's all that matters to him.

WPT's Here and Now talked with Keith Reopelle, senior policy director at Clean Wisconsin, who made it perfectly clear about the human cost being bargained away by lobbyists at WMC and Scott Walker. The supposed massive cost of moving away from coal deceptively never figured in the savings costs associated with the change:

Scott Manley, vise president for government relations at WMC (he's a lobbyist), bragged about the smog, soot and carbon monoxide standards his industry never wanted in the first place, warning us at the time it would kill the economy... and didn't. Manley then had the nerve to say climate predictions haven't been accurate:

FREDERICA FREYBERG: So this has become an argument, then, of jobs versus the health of people or the environment?
 
SCOTT MANLEY: No, it doesn’t because we actually don’t need this rule to have clean air. We have smog standards, soot standards, carbon monoxide standards in place right now … these are health-based standards that protect human health. This rule…is an incredibly ineffective rule as it relates to global warming and climate change…why are we going to spend billions of dollars and put thousands of middle class factory workers out of a job so that we can have a negligible impact on global temperature?

Did you notice how Manley shifted from human health, to bash climate change instead? So much for the human carnage:

CBSNews: If the latest report from America's top weather experts is an indication, it's becoming really hard to deny global warming. Temperatures last year across the world reached record highs, according to the "State of the Climate in 2014" report from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Center for Weather and Climate. Sea levels continued to rise andglaciers kept shrinking while record concentrations of greenhouse gases including carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide were recorded in the atmosphere.

The most jarring data from the NOAA climate report was on temperatures, with four separate, global data sets confirming the world saw record high temperatures in 2014, with 20 countries from Europe to Mexico setting records. These were the highest temperatures seen in the past 135 years.

From NASA, this unnerving gif showing global warming, a supposed fiction pushed by big business. Many Republicans won't even play it safe, you know, just in case: