The Obama administration announced new EPA rules Tuesday that sharply limit the output of carbon dioxide emissions from new power plants.

And not surprisingly, the mining industry objected.

"Requiring coal-based power plants to meet an emissions standard based on natural gas technology is a policy overtly calculated to destroy a significant portion of America's electricity supply," said Hal Quinn, chief executive of the National Mining Assn. "This proposal is the latest convoy in EPA's regulatory train wreck that is rolling across America, crushing jobs and arresting our economic recovery at every stop. It is not an 'all of the above' energy strategy." 

Of course, what Quinn doesn't want to talk about is what types of jobs the EPA rules are "crushing."

To get a better idea of that, you need to read another Times story Tuesday, one headlined "Report: Safety agency failed to enforce laws at deadly mine."

That story tells of the regulatory and safety lapses at the Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia, where an explosion in 2010 killed 29 coal miners and seriously injured two others.

It's a story of lax regulatory enforcement, of inspectors simply not doing their jobs, and of a mine operator that, as the Department of Labor's Mine Safety and Health Administration said in a report on the deadly incident, engaged in  "systematic, intentional and aggressive efforts ... to avoid compliance with safety and health standards, and to thwart detection of that non-compliance by federal and state regulators."

How bad were conditions at the mine?  Bad enough that "Alpha Natural Resources, the company that acquired Massey Energy Co. after the explosion, reached a settlement late last year with the Department of Justice in which it agreed to pay a record $209 million in compensation and fines and federal prosecutors agreed not to pursue criminal charges against the company," according to The Times' story.

Even so, some former officials at the mine are under criminal indictment. 

Last month, prosecutors charged the then-superintendent of the mine with conspiring with others to block federal regulators from enforcing safety requirements -- a charge that suggests other individuals are likely targets of action as well.

Prosecutors allege that the former superintendent altered the mine’s ventilation system while an inspector was taking an air sample and ordered that a monitor be rewired so that mining could continue despite elevated levels of methane.

What industry spokesman Quinn also didn't talk about is that EPA regulations would apply only to new power plants, and that, as The Times story said, "the proposed regulations further bolster a trend that the power industry began years ago, as more utilities replaced aging coal-fired plants with new natural gas plants. Very few new coal plants are now on the drawing boards."

Coal is a relatively cheap power source, but it's only really cheap if you ignore the costs in lost lives mining it and the health effects from burning it, not to mention the environmental costs from digging it up.

As The Times story concludes:

"[W]hat this essentially says is we will never be building dirty old coal plants ever again," said Michael Brune of the Sierra Club, one of the litigants in the lawsuit that led to the development of the new rules. "The dominant power source of the 19^th and 20^th centuries won’t be built the same again."

This isn't about "crushing" jobs.

This is about progress. And it's time to move on.

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Did an open mic catch Obama making promises to Russia?

-- Paul Whitefield

Photo: President Obama speaks about energy on March 22 at a TransCanada pipe yard near Cushing, Okla. Credit: Larry W. Smith / EPA

Republicans are livid about a comment that President Obama made -- unaware that it was being captured by an open microphone -- to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev. Referring to protracted discussions over the placement of a U.S. missile defense system in Europe, Obama said: "On all these issues, but particularly missile defense, this can be solved.  But it's important for [incoming President Vladimir Putin] to give me space. This is my last election. After my election I have more flexibility."  Sounding like a spy, Medvedev responded: "I will transmit this information to Vladimir."

Were Obama's comments proof that he was "pulling his punches with the American people" and obscuring his plans for the missile defense system? That’s what Mitt Romney suggested.  John R. Bolton, whom conservatives would like to see as Romney’s secretary of State, called the remarks a "fire bell in the night" and a harbinger of capitulations  to come  if Obama is reelected.  Karl Rove contributed a piece to the Fox News site headlined  "Why Obama's Open Mic Slip Could Seriously Hurt his Re-Election Hopes."

The overheard Obama remarks were certainly a gaffe, but that was because they were overheard. The president should have been more discreet and wary of electronic amplification. But the comments themselves are defensible, even obvious.

The Russians don't need Obama to tell them that it's bad timing for him to accelerate negotiations that would bring exactly the sort of outcry from hard-liners that greeted his "private" comments. It's likely he or his emissaries have pointed to the election as a reason for patience on other fronts. It would be no surprise, for example, if the administration has been telling Palestinians it will be more likely to press Israel to stop West Bank  settlements after the U.S. election.

Obama insists that he isn't  trying to "hide the ball" from the American people about his plans for missile defense and said he would continue to work with the Russians on the issue later this year. He can now expect to be asked, by Romney or a debate panelist, if he would be willing to share details of the missile defense system with the Russians to assuage their fears that it might undermine their nuclear deterrent.

It's a fair question, and Obama should answer it, but he committed no sin in reminding the Russians that all sorts of issues, domestic and foreign, move to the back burner during an election campaign.

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Candidates go PG-13 on the press

--Michael McGough

Photo: President Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev after their meeting in Seoul. Credit: Jewwl Samad / AFP/Getty Images

It may become part of the decathlon known as the Republican road to the White House -– to get down and potty-mouth about the news media.

Former Sen. Rick Santorum's base is probably cheering him to the rafters after he took a vulgar swipe at a New York Times reporter's question Sunday following a Santorum speech in Wisconsin to the effect that Mitt Romney's Massachusetts healthcare law made him "the worst Republican in the country to put up against Barack Obama."

After Santorum's remarks, New York Times reporter Jeff Zeleny zeroed in on that remark, asking Santorum to elaborate:  "You said that Mitt Romney is the worst Republican in the country. Is that true?"

Santorum asked, "What speech did you listen to?"

Zeleny asked again, and Santorum, jabbing a finger toward Zeleny, said "stop lying" and "quit distorting my words. If I see it, it's bullshit. C'mon, man, what are you doing?"

The next day, and evidently in a more cheerful frame of mind, he used the incident as a kind of campaign medal, telling the Fox News Channel, "If you haven't cursed out a New York Times reporter during the course of a campaign, you're not really a real Republican, is the way I look at it." And he told CNN that he was making the case that Romney could not criticize President Obama’s healthcare law because Romney "wrote the blueprint" for it. "And to then say, you know, spin this as Rick Santorum said he's the worst Republican in the country." 

Candidates can never go wrong slamming the news media. Santorum may have been referring to an incident during the 2000 presidential campaign when then-Gov. George W. Bush, talking to his running mate Dick Cheney at a Labor Day event, was picked up by an open mike when he indicated the press corps and said, "There’s Adam Clymer, major-league asshole from the New York Times." Cheney evidently agreed and said, "Oh yeah, big-time."

Bush said he didn't realize the mikes would pick up his voice, but he did not apologize.

(Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry made a vulgar comment about a Secret Service agent during the presidential campaign, but he made it on the record to a reporter, after the agent on Kerry's detail accidentally knocked him down on a ski slope in Idaho. "I don't fall down. The son of a bitch" -- the agent -- ran into him, Kerry told the reporter. Different circumstance from Obama's gaffe to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, caught on an open mike in South Korea on Monday: "This is my last election. After my election I have more flexibility.")

Maybe one of the most renowned press attacks was President Nixon's, heard on White House tapes siccing the IRS on L.A. Times Publisher Otis Chandler.

On Oct. 7, 1971, more than a year before election day, Nixon ordered the attorney general to check on whether Chandler's gardener was a "wetback," and mentioned that he had ordered an Internal Revenue Service investigation of the Chandler family. "I want this whole goddam bunch gone after.... Every one of those sons of bitches," Nixon said.

He also told the attorney general, John Mitchell, to have the Immigration and Naturalization Service raid The Times looking for illegal immigrants.

A day earlier, The Times had reported on 36 illegal immigrants taken into custody during an immigration raid at a tortilla factory owned by Romana Banuelos, whom the White House had just nominated for the position of U.S. Treasurer (she would become the highest-placed Mexican American in government).

The president told Mitchell that "as a Californian, I know. Everybody in California hires them. There's no law against it, because they are there, because -- for menial things and so forth. Otis Chandler -- I want him checked with regard to his gardener. I understand he's a wetback. Is that clear?"

The Times had decades earlier steadfastly supported and encouraged Nixon; in the midst of Nixon's 1952 ''slush fund'' scandal, The Times' headline had been "Sen. Nixon's Defiance of Smear Hailed."

And George McGovern, the Democrat running against Nixon in 1972, didn't say it to a reporter but to a heckler. McGovern leaned forward and whispered in the man's ear, "Listen, you son of a bitch, why don't you kiss my ass?"

Like Santorum, McGovern too made some political capital out of the incident.

By the next day, McGovern supporters were showing up at rallies with buttons reading "KMA." 

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COMMENTARY AND ANALYSIS: Presidential Election 2012

-- Patt Morrison

Photo: Rick Santorum speaks on March 25 at South Hills Country Club during a public rally near Racine, Wis. Credit: Gregory Shaver/Journal Times, AP Photo

To find the earliest stories the Los Angeles Times wrote about Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, I had to search for his birth name -– Lewis Alcindor Jr. He was a New York high school student being courted by UCLA and other powerhouse basketball schools.

So it took a bit of mind-bending to go from reading about that teenage school kid to interviewing the sports legend who’s about to turn 65 -- the man who, when I talked to him for my "Patt Morrison Asks" column, joked that his arms, the arms that pulled off that phenomenal "sky hook" shot, are getting too short to read the newspaper.

Life after basketball has meant some TV and movie roles (he was hilarious in "Airplane!"), writing and co-writing a slew of books, and now as a U.S. global cultural ambassador. Check him out with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton at the event in January, where he says, "I remember when Louis Armstrong first did it back for President Kennedy, one of my heroes. So it’s nice to be following in his footsteps."

He’s made his first trip abroad in that new iteration, to Brazil, and I asked him about the job description, and his visit to Brazil.

"They want me to speak to disadvantaged kids about their future with an emphasis on education, and answer questions  about Americans and democracy and what it’s like here in this place we call America."

I wondered whether Brazilian kids knew who he was.

"Yes, I was surprised! They have three or four [Brazilian] guys in the NBA, so the kids there now play the game. They have courts in some of the slum neighborhoods."

And what did they want to know about the U.S.?

"They were very taken with President Obama. They [also] have a history of slavery there. To see President Obama become president, it really gives them a different idea about the potential of democracy. That was something they all wanted to ask about, [whether] this democracy stuff can work for [them]."

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--Patt Morrison

Photo: Former basketball star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar poses with a jersey of Barcelona's basketball team during the official presentation of the friendly basketball game between Barcelona  and the Lakers at the Palau Blaugrana in Barcelona on June 1, 2010. Credit: Josep Lago /AFP/Getty Images

"If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon."

With those 10 simple words, President Obama said so much on Friday.

Obama was at the White House -- introducing his nominee to take over as World Bank president -- when he was asked by a reporter to address the fatal shooting of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin.

He also offered this somewhat stock comment:

"I think all of us have to do some soul-searching to figure out how does something like this happen. And that means that we examine the laws and the context for what happened, as well as the specifics of the incident."

Any president could have -- probably would have -- said that.

But it doesn't have the power of the "if I had a son" remark, or this:  

"Obviously this is a tragedy. I can only imagine what these parents are going through. And when I think about this boy, I think about my own kids."

Never before has the killing of a young black man been quite so personal to one of our presidents. 

Oh, we've had presidents who did great things for civil rights -- Lyndon B. Johnson, for example.

But this is different. And it's one of the reasons that Obama's presidency is so historic, and so important to the United States.

Trayvon Martin is far from the first young black man to be killed in murky circumstances. The Times has reported on the troubling history of black residents and police in Sanford, Fla., where the shooting took place.  And The Times' editorial board weighed in on Florida's so-called stand your ground law, which may have played a role in this and a number of other shootings labeled self-defense in that state.

No, what makes this death notable is that this time our president -- and his children -- look like the victim. Heck, in other circumstances -- easily imagined circumstances, in fact -- one of them could have been the victim.

Obama did not judge anyone with his comments, did not label anyone. But when this president says, "I think all of us have to do some soul-searching to figure out how does something like this happen" --– well, yes, any president could have said that, but there's a little something extra there.

The United States can be proud of the advances it has made in civil rights. Racism is nowhere near as overt and pervasive today.

But, of course, it's still there.

Only now, when our president speaks out about it, it's, well, personal.

And that's why it doesn't really matter if Obama is just a one-term president, or if he achieves little in terms of legislative triumphs.

Because of him, we as a nation will never be quite the same. In electing Obama, we have looked racism in the eye and said "no."  

And that's a great thing.  

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--Paul Whitefield

Photo: President Obama was asked about the killing of Trayvon Martin on Friday during a White House ceremony. Credit:  Haraz N. Ghanbari / Associated Press

Much criticism has been heaped on a top campaign aide to Mitt Romney for saying that the campaign could "hit a reset button" for the general election, shaking up and restarting "like an Etch-A-Sketch." Eric Fehrnstrom's comments on CNN let rivals renew their accusations that Romney is pretending to be a conservative simply to win the GOP nomination, at which point he reverts to being a Massachusetts moderate.

What struck me about the comment was how Fehrnstrom seems to be living in an alternate universe, one without cable news channels and the Internet. There may be a reset button in that environment, but there sure isn't one in this world.

Romney tried to put a wildly different spin on Fehrnstrom's remarks Wednesday afternoon, saying his aide was simply talking about organizational matters. The "policies and positions" of the campaign won't change, Romney said, but "the nature of the campaign itself, in terms of staff, funding, the states we would go to, will be different than today.”

COMMENTARY AND ANALYSIS: Presidential Election 2012

The real meaning of Fehrnstrom's comments seems to lie somewhere in between. Fehrnstrom was responding to a question on whether Romney had moved too far to the right in the primary to win in the general election. His answer clearly addresses more than just where Romney would stump for votes as the nominee; it advances the view that the general-election campaign starts from scratch.

That's just not possible. Romney, like all of his opponents in the race, will never be a blank slate again. All of their public utterances on the campaign trail have been preserved somewhere on tape or online. Much of President Obama's campaign in the fall will be reminding voters of the things that his opponent, whether it be Romney or someone else, has said in his efforts to win over GOP members who have the least in common with the voters who can tip the election -- independents, centrists and the growing population of Latino Americans.

Not that the president's campaign will confine its search to things his Republican opponent said in the current primaries. If Romney is the nominee, we can expect an extended tour through his years at Bain Capital, as well as revisiting the (ahem) dissonance between positions Romney took as Massachusetts governor and the ones he's espousing today.

Obama has the distinct advantage of not having to fend off rivals on his left to win the Democratic nomination. Like the eventual Republican nominee, his campaign in the fall will have to balance the need to play to his base -- that is, to motivate members of his own party -- with the imperative to attract swing voters. But that's an especially tricky task for Romney, given how unenthusiastic GOP conservatives have been about his candidacy. For them, any move Romney makes to the middle may be seen less as electoral pragmatism and more as a show of true colors.

What Fehrnstrom should have said to CNN was that Romney hasn't moved too far to the right; he's had to focus too much on himself and his rivals and not enough on Obama. His campaign has tried repeatedly to shift into general-election mode, with Romney ignoring his GOP opponents and confining his remarks to the incumbent's record.

If Romney can keep voters focused on Obama and the country's struggles over the last few years, he won't have to try to sell independents on the positions he's taken over the past few months. That's a big "if," and it depends to a large extent on the economy losing steam. But then, with a European financial meltdown still a possibility, along with $5-a-gallon gasoline, the recovery could sputter again, just as it did last spring after an earthquake and tsunami crippled Japan.  Maybe that's the reset button Fehrnstrom had in mind.

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--Jon Healey

Credit: Associated Press / The Ohio Art Co./Ellen Dallager

Pity the poor Washington Monument.  Not only was it damaged in a magnitude 5.8 earthquake last year, but now we learn that it's sinking.  And leaning.

(Thankfully, The Times' story Thursday didn't say which way it's leaning, so we won't have to wade through a comment board full of wisecracks and loony conspiracy theories.)

Fortunately, the leaning is nothing like that tower in Pisa. The sinking? That's another matter:

The obelisk -- which is 555 feet, 5 inches tall -- has subsided only two inches since it was finished in 1884, according to new data from the National Geodetic Survey.

But naturally (if you're of a certain political persuasion, that is), things have gotten worse since President Obama arrived:

Preliminary data collected Wednesday showed that the monument has sunk two millimeters since the last survey was done in 2009.

And you thought the "birther" thing was nasty.  Just wait until Fox News gets hold of this story. Not to mention the fact that Obama has apparently switched the country to the metric system behind our backs.  Must be part of his evil plot to remake the U.S. into one of those European countries.

I can hear Newt Gingrich now:  "Not only do we have $4 a gallon gasoline, but this president has no plan for saving the Washington Monument.  Elect me and not only will I fix it, I'll build a monument to myself right next to it!  And it won't cost taxpayers a thing. Sheldon Adelson will pay for the whole thing!"

Of course, you may think that Washington is a swamp.  But you may not know that that's literally true:

Dave Doyle, the government's chief geodetic surveyor, is trying to determine how much of the sinking is a natural result of building an 81,120-ton stone pillar on reclaimed land, and how much was caused by last summer’s quake.

"People see the Washington Monument sitting on a nice little hill. They think that was always there, and it wasn't; much of it was swampy," he said.

If you know your history, you know that many people weren't keen on building the nation's capital on this land.  Now we know why:

In fact, the entire western end of the National Mall is built on former marshland, meaning the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials are sinking at about the same rate as the monument, according to Doyle’s measurements.

If you appreciate irony, though, there's this:

The Capitol and the White House are on firmer ground, and Doyle said there is no evidence they are sinking.

Doyle's a professional, so I'm sure there's no political intent behind his observations about "sinking" and "firmer ground."   My theory, though, is that it isn't so much the firmer ground but the fact that "hot air rises" is holding up the Capitol and the White House.

Anyway, I for one am pleased to see that at least someone in Washington knows what they're doing.  

Doyle's going to keep measuring, and hopefully we're not going to see a real-life version of those History Channel "Life After People" episodes.

George Washington probably would be mad enough at the mess we've made of his country. Let's not ruin his monument too.

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Big government won't build you a snore room, that's for sure

-- Paul Whitefield

Photo: David Doyle, chief geodetic surveyor with the National Geodetic Survey, at the base of the Washington Monument. Credit: Charles Dharapak / Associated Press

What is it about politics that makes some people lose all perspective?

Today's two examples come from near -- and far.

In the United States, we have Exhibit A, also known as Newt Gingrich.  

Exhibit B comes from Afghanistan: one Hamid Karzai.

Gingrich wants to be president, but he has no shot.  Karzai is a president, but if he's not careful, he will be shot.

Of course, one doesn't enter politics without a healthy -- some might say overinflated -- ego. The best politicians are, by nature, risk-takers. Where others hold back, they charge ahead.  It takes them to great heights sometimes but also brings great falls: see Clinton, Bill, and Nixon, Richard. 

(Thursday brought another reminder:  Former Illinois Gov. Rod Rod Blagojevich left Chicago for Colorado, where he'll be serving a sentence on corruption charges in federal prison.)

And ego certainly applies to Gingrich. Times staff writer Paul West on Thursday summed up Gingrich's motivation for staying in the GOP presidential race:

At 68, the former House speaker is making what figures to be his last fling at elective politics.  But it is his sense of himself as an epic figure that may well be what's keeping him going.

Gingrich hopes for a brokered convention, something that hasn't happened for decades but that appeals to the historian in him.  It may be a figment of his imagination, but it's a harmless fantasy -- unless you're Mitt Romney and hoping to wrap up the nomination.

Karzai, on the other hand, is playing a much more dangerous game.  On Thursday, Times staff writer Laura King reported from Kabul that the Afghan president "had demanded a quicker end to the Western combat mission and a pullback of NATO troops from rural areas."

Karzai's office said he told visiting Defense Secretary Leon Panetta that by year's end, U.S. troops should be garrisoned only in large bases, abandoning outposts in rural districts like Panjwayi, the scene of Sunday's shooting deaths. 

"Afghanistan's security forces have the capability to provide security in the villages of Afghanistan," said a statement from Karzai's office.

Which makes one wonder what country Karzai thinks he's living in. Especially because the Taliban announced Thursday that not only was it suspending talks with the United States on the war but that it would be "pointless" to engage in any talks with the Karzai government.

Karzai's response?

The president also called for a significant acceleration of the handover of security responsibilities to Afghan forces, saying NATO should wind down its combat role in 2013 instead of 2014. "Our demand is to speed up this process, and authority should be given to Afghans," the presidential palace's statement said.

Perhaps Karzai could take a lesson from Gingrich and read up on his history.  Here's a name he might want to check out: Najibullah.

After the Soviet Union withdrew its forces from Afghanistan, Najibullah was president.  Forced from office during the ensuing civil war, Najibullah took refuge in the U.N. compound in Kabul for four years.  But in 1996, the Taliban seized power. 

A Times' story from Friday Sept. 27, 1996, records his fate:

The bloated, beaten body of the man who also once headed the hated Afghan Communists' security service was strung up from a lamppost outside the presidential palace, reports said.

The Times' Doyle McManus wrote Thursday that given recent events, President Obama needs a Plan C for getting out of Afghanistan.  So Karzai may get his wish for a sped-up withdrawal.  

But if that's the case, Karzai's name just might end up listed next to Najibullah's in the history books of the 21st century.

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-- Paul Whitefield

Photo: Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, left, meets with Afghan President Hamid Karza in Kabul on Thursday. Credit: Mohammad Ismail / EPA

It's a classic inside-the-Beltway issue that brings yawns from even some political junkies. I'm talking about the delay in Senate confirmation of President Obama's judicial nominees. It doesn't have the drama or political salience of, say, a deadlock over the debt ceiling, but the obstruction of judges is symbolic of the partisan gridlock that drove Sen. Olympia Snowe back to Maine.

This week, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid filed a cloture motion to try to force debate on 17 nominations to federal district courts. That prompted his Republican counterpart, Mitch McConnell, to sputter: "We're going to turn to something contentious instead of trying to do something that almost all of us agree on, that focuses on jobs" -- a reference to pending small-business legislation passed by the House.

Jobs bills are arguably more urgent than judicial nominations, but 11 of the nominees have been awaiting action for months. Most recently, they have been held hostage by Republican objections to some of Obama's recess appointments. But stalling judicial confirmations is an old story -- and Democrats played the game to delay or derail judicial nominations during the George W. Bush administration.

Compared to, say, someone laid off because of the recession, a judicial nominee waiting for confirmation isn't a particularly poignant figure. But delays in confirmation do more than inconvenience nominees (for example, by making it impossible for them to take on new legal business); they also slow the administration of justice. Reid was right to call the Republicans on their obstructionism.

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-- Michael McGough

Photo: Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid gestures during a news conference on Capitol Hill in Washington on Tuesday. Credit: Manuel Balce Ceneta / AP Photo

Environmentalists: Prepare to be shaken up. It turns out that hydraulic fracturing, a.k.a. fracking, a.k.a. the latest fossil fuel industry outrage to be perpetrated on planet Earth, isn't just a menace because it may be contaminating groundwater. It also can cause earthquakes.

Ohio oil and gas regulators said Friday that a preliminary report on the relationship between a fracking waste disposal well near Youngstown and a series of minor earthquakes in northeastern Ohio last year found evidence "strongly indicating the Youngstown-area earthquakes were induced." What the frack does this mean? In addition to giving anti-frackers something else to complain about, it means companies drilling for natural gas will probably face a host of new regulatory restrictions aimed at ensuring they don't do anything earth shattering in the future. In Ohio, regulators announced a series of new rules for disposing of and transporting brine, a waste product from fracking, and they're likely to spread.

That's not a bad thing. But before greens who aim to restrict or ban fracking get too worked up about this new entry to the list of its dangers, they should consider that very similar risks also apply to another energy source considered by many -- including Al Gore and President Obama -- to be among the world's great hopes of fending off climate change and weaning us off fossil fuels: geothermal.

The principles involved in fracking and geothermal power production are similar: In both cases, one drills deep into the earth and injects water (combined with other chemicals, in the case of fracking) into fissures. Geothermal energy is produced when hot rock turns the water to steam, which returns to the surface and is used to turn generators. In fracking, the chemicals are used to force natural gas to the surface. Very little seismic activity has been attributed to the process of fracking itself, but things get more dangerous around disposal wells such as the one in Ohio, in which the waste water or brine from fracking is dispensed with by being reinjected, and far more liquid is involved.

In his book "Our Choice," Al Gore says of geothermal energy, "Like solar energy and wind power, geothermal energy could -- if properly developed -- match all of the energy from coal, gas and oil combined." Obama's stimulus package, meanwhile, contained $350 million for development of geothermal projects. It's easy to see what they're so heated up about. Unlike wind and solar power, whose generation stops when the sun goes down or the wind stops blowing, the Earth's magma is always hot, and geothermal power production emits only steam. But it turns out that when you inject water into hot fissures, it cracks them, and deep underground shifts can cause considerable surface rumbling. After a major geothermal project in Basel, Switzerland, had to be shut down because it caused quakes that rattled that city in 2009, one of the nation's biggest projects to pursue the technology (located near my hometown of Santa Rosa) was tabled. The company behind it, AltaRock Energy, is now carrying out experiments in a sparsely populated area in central Oregon instead.

Regulators are right to insist on maximum standards to protect the public from such risky practices, and it's a very good idea to hold off on major projects until more is known about the science. But those who seek to ban fracking because of its earthquake risks should consider the more beneficial technologies they may be quashing. Geothermal power has vast potential, but until we get to a cleaner future, we're going to need more natural gas as a transitional fuel. Pursuing both is richly worthwhile, if it can be done safely.

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-- Dan Turner

Photo: Environmentalists rally against fracking in Albany, N.Y., in January. Credit: Mike Groll / Associated Press