My trip this week to Carbondale was to have been another stop on the book tour — a regional development conference and biochar masterclass — but it turned into a glimpse into why President Cobblepot may be elected to a second term by the abused and beaten citizens of Gotham.
The economic engine for Carbondale had once been coal (hence the name). The coal under this part of the world began as forest and swamp when the US Midwest was located near the equator. 250 million years later, Illinois was where the dark stones were encountered first by Europeans setting out to survey the new continent, in 1673.
An earthquake (lying along a precursor to the New Madrid fault perhaps) likely caused the terrain to suddenly go below the sea and the pressure of rock over millions of years created today’s coal and shale. Note the grey area on this state map. You can see that only a small fraction of those black rocks have been exploited over the past 300 years.
One of the most fascinating lectures I heard at the New Climate Economy forum here in Carbondale was provided by Seth Feaster, Energy Data Analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. I am going to include many of his slides in…