Editor:

Wyoming lawmakers advancing tax breaks for "Oxy-combustion" coal-fired power plants and Tony Hayward, chief executive of BP and promoter of natural gas-fired power plants, apparently have the same important goals -- to encourage the production of large amounts of electrical energy in an environmentally clean and sustainable manner using Wyoming’s vast coal and natural gas resources.

Note that the fundamental combustion process used for both natural gas and the "new" "Oxy-combustion" coal combustion technology produces enormous amounts of energy. During the combustion process, both coal and natural gas also produce enormous amounts of clean, invisible, and nontoxic carbon dioxide, together with clean, invisible, and nontoxic water vapor. Both technologies use effective, modern pollution controls designed to minimize the air-polluting greenhouse gas emissions of filthy, highly visible, incompletely combusted black carbon and maximize the nonpolluting emissions of clean carbon dioxide produced from completely combusted black carbon. Overall, this is a pretty neat demonstration of how lawmakers can work with the coal and natural gas industries to insure clean Wyoming air and generate lots of clean Wyoming energy.

Rather than encouraging Congress to continue throwing massive amounts of public money at vague, ill-defined, and controversial programs such as saving the planet, reversal of global warming, and reversal of climate change, many scientists are prodding the leadership in Washington to focus on two global problems of legitimate concern -- air pollution and increased worldwide production of clean energy. Recent tourists to Beijing, including many scientists who have studied the air pollution problem for the last 50 years, conclude the brown cloud of highly visible, toxic air pollution cannot and will not be reduced by reducing the amounts of invisible, nontoxic carbon dioxide in the air.

Considering the limited amounts of money available for both air pollution research and new clean energy technologies, let’s encourage our leadership to selectively fund those companies like BP and OXY that have the specific goal and technical capability of reducing air pollution and have demonstrated the technical capability of producing meaningful amounts of clean energy in a consistent, predictable manner.

JOHN McKAY, Laramie