On Tuesday 4 May 2010, UNC Chancellor Thorp demonstrated the smart way to handle Progressive agitators crying for no more coal burning at UNC Chapel Hill. Give them what they want. Just use technological sleight of hand to replace what you were doing with something just as bad.

With the national director of the Sierra Club’s coal campaign ready to be played like a goob, Chancellor Holden Thorp announced that the UNC-CH would end its use of coal by 2020. “Universities must lead the transition away from fossil fuels to clean energy. Today, Carolina takes another big step in that direction. Carolina is proud to be a national leader in sustainability in American higher education. Our systems for energy efficiency, cogeneration of electricity and steam, waste recycling, green building, mass transit and water conservation are models. We are in an unusual position because our cogeneration plant has a useful life of another 30 to 40 years. It’s not going to be easy to make this transition. We have challenges in making sure biomass will work in our existing boilers and challenges on the supply side as well. But we are confident we can achieve our goal in 10 years.”

So what is the shell game being played by UNC? Actually it’s a charcoal shell game. The UNC cogeneration facility will test co-firing coal with biomass in the form of dried wood pellets later this spring and torrefied wood – basically charcoal that grinds like coal later in 2010.

Campus Progressives were beaming. After all, they had forced UNC to behave the way they wanted. Mr. Stewart Boss, coordinator for the Coal-Free UNC Campaign and co-chair for the UNC chapter of the Sierra Student Coalition said “We have been fortunate to work with a university that has been responsive, open-minded and willing to hear our story. Our universities should be at the forefront of developing clean energy technologies and preparing students to be clean energy leaders. I hope other universities will soon follow UNC’s lead in moving beyond coal.”

In February 2010, Mr. Boss (a most perfect surname for a Progressive) demonstrated with others against the use of coal. Co-demonstrator Ms. Laura Stevens said, “We want to get a commitment from the University to end the use of coal. Then we’re open to research.” Now that’s true Progressive thinking. First you set a “feels good” goal. Then you figure out how you can meet your goal. The hell with technology and economics. If you want the pony, then you’re getting the pony. (See DTH Coal Pony Story.)

Here are the sad truths. Coal does contain trace amounts of dangerous heavy metals such as mercury and arsenic. Coal does produce greenhouse gases when burned. But so does UNC’s biomass replacement fuel substituting for coal. That’s right. Coal was formed from heated compression of biomass. Charcoal, as in char-coal, (as well as other forms of biomass) contains trace amounts of mercury and arsenic. Charcoal produces the same greenhouse gases (GHG). Charcoal (or torrefied wood) produces about the same quantity of GHG per ton as coal.

What? So how will UNC going “Coal Free” help the environment? It won’t. The new biomass fuel is as carbonaceous as the old fossil fuel. It will just cost UNC more money because the biomass fuel costs more per BTU produced.

Who cares? It sure does feel good to get up in front of unquestioning news media and say that you’re going “Coal Free”.

In most of North Carolina, if a group of students shut down a speech by an invited campus speaker through the threat of force, there would be little concern for the politics of the speaker and sure condemnation of the protesting provocateurs. But southern Orange is not like the rest of North Carolina.

Here, the Alice-in-Wonderland looking glass alters reality. The invited campus speaker doesn’t have the right to free speech. If the speaker doesn't agree with your view on controlling national borders, then they practice hate speech. The provocateurs aren’t criminals. Force is acceptable if stopping hate speech. The UNC administration is shocked to learn that campus progressives (students and teachers) are intolerant fascists engaged in their own “Kristalltag”. The UNC administration is shocked to learn that instead of promoting free speech, the ivory, ebony, and jade tower of UNC uniformity of thought promotes the rise of intolerant facists.

UNC provocateurs called the speaker (former Colorado Representative Mr. Tom Tancredo) a “racist!” and a “white supremacist piece of shit!” The cheer of “No dialogue with hate!” echoed throughout the classroom in which Mr. Tancredo attempted to deliver his speech. Pulpsters can check out live video of the event for themselves. In a particularly memorable tour de force of progressive logic, protest organizer Mr. Tyler Oakley, a UNC graduate student and Romance Language teaching assistant, said, ”You [Mr. Tancredo] have to respect the right of people [the free speech disrupters] to assemble and collectively speak [disrupt your speech].”

The local media digs deep into the news wastebin to drag out and feature the intolerance in 1963 against communist speech, conveniently downplaying in a sidebar the string of speakers (all tarred as “right wingers”) that have marked the ever-constricting grasp of political correctness that dominates UNC campus speech. (See N & O Tancredo story and UNC free speech sidebar report.) That's called balance, featuring a 40 year old event against the totalitarian left, thereby equating Mr. Tancredo with being from the totalitarian right.

The executive director of the North Carolina ACLU decries the student and teacher incited violence against the campus speaker, while simultaneously comparing the Mr. Tancredo's words to ”racist hate speech”. The thin line between “hate speech” and “hate crimes” is blurred a little more. In the words of Ms. Jennifer Rudinger, former head of the Alaska ACLU and an over $800 Obama presidential campaign contributor who has no idea what words Mr. Tancredo would have said at UNC, “Tancredo has the right to express his views against mass immigration, just as students at N.C. State had the right to paint racist remarks against President Barack Obama on the campus Free Expression Tunnel on Election Day last fall. Censorship is not the answer to hate speech. Hate speech is protected by the Constitution.”

(Query, if Mr. Tancredo is uttering hate speech, and that speech led to the protestors' criminal actions, then is Mr. Tancredo guilty of a “hate crime”?)

In a moment either of divine comedy or complete cluelessness, UNC Chancellor Holden Thorp declared his disappointment that UNC the students didn't uphold ”the university's commitment to free speech and diverse viewpoints.”

Mr. Thorp has reacted in a predictably progressive fashion. He reacts to the embarrassment of the incident and not to how the incident came to be fostered on the UNC campus. ”We didn't get anything[any alumni calls] from anybody happy with the way things went. The fact that it got out of hand is embarrassing.”