nospecinterests

The federal budget is very loose (unless Congress specifies something specific. For example, According To The US Government Printing Office, Section 554 of the Bipartisan passed H.R. 4660, An Act Making appropriations for the Departments of Commerce and Justice, Science, and Related Agencies for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2015, and for other purposes.

"Sec. 554. None of the funds made available in this Act may be used to carry out Operation Choke Point."[0]

My point is that managers and execs have a lot of wiggle room and the ability to make a number of funding transfers and decisions. They could clearly use budgeted funds or make a request for funding to accomplish actual data retention if they wanted to.

What makes you think that the Republicans involvement will make sure that "this will never happen". It doesn't matter what the Republicans do when the Democrat administration under President Obama just ignores them and the law.

[0] http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/BILLS-113hr4660pcs/html/BILLS-1...

Edited to change the source material because some people could not handle the link originally used and to add the second sentence in the 3rd paragraph.

I replied the way I did because you wrote "my guess is that natural gas is being switched out for coal for many reasons". That is not true. That is why I said it might have been a typo. This is clear because in your reply above your write the opposite, that coal is being replaced by natural gas. I agree with this, and as you wrote above, 100%.

I would greatly disagree. Non-establishment repubs are not into empire building or attacking civil liberties and are clearly closer to libertarianism than the modern democrat. But both parties, overall, are mostly made up of establishment FDR progressives. At that point the D or the R is irrelevant.

Never mind the fact that President Lincoln was the first Republican president and that that might have something to do with it.

You, just like everyone else, would have no clue as to what might have happened if President Lincoln were to have not been murdered. For all we know he would have given it back or more likely sold it off to pay for the war debt.

Natural gas is not being switched out for coal. At least not in the USA. I think that might be a typo. I unfortunately can not site a fancy link like you have but from experience I can tell you that the actual costs I have encountered for projects showed that the price of scrubber tech/equipment (and installation) was less then the cost of a plant conversion from coal to natural gas.

The costs of coal are higher than they were before and are growing. This is a direct result of government regulation. The other problem is that these regulations and the continual call for more is causing a great deal of market uncertainty, which is also driving up costs (not just for the coal but for equipment). Natural gas is currently not in the same position, it is cheaper and less regulated (no mining regulations/legislation). Further, because there has been so much drilled for there is a surplus (supply and demand ==> gas costs are lower). This is mostly because of the lack of good, viable, stable export terminals. So when some terminals open in the future we will see higher natural gas prices.

When it comes to coal these efforts and those who support them seem to always make the assumption that there is nothing that can be done to make burning coal "cleaner". After working with the utilities industries (mostly natural gas industries) I can tell you with 100% certainty that more than 80% of the by products from the burning of coal, including CO2, can be removed using scrubbing technologies and filters. In many cases the cost to install these technologies are lower than the costs to convert a plant to natural gas. The problem is that EPA regulations on coal are driving the costs up (by making it harder to mine and transport) to the point where in the long run natural gas is cheaper (though get a change in the US administration and that could sway the other way again)(Edit: Which is why a lot of coal plants are being converted to natural gas). My point is that if coal didn't cost as much as it currently does (because of federal regulation) a number of technologies could be installed that would enable coal plants to continue to be used with much much less environmental impact.

This is not true at all. Making energy more expensive to harvest, store, and consume directly impacts production costs. The higher the price the more organizations move production to areas of lower costs. When they are prevented from moving they pass those costs on to their customers.