millions of people and when things go horribly wrong, the people who have statewide office and are appointed to statewide positions, they re in charge of fixing it and if they get it wrong, it goes wrong for everybody. north carolina right now is living through an unscientific noncontrolled experiment about what happens when you put people in charge who believe stuff like this. unless you have any hope that maybe this isn t something government will fix, maybe industry will be better because, oh, at least industry doesn t have the luxury of cockamamy ideologically motivated science denialism that makes you believe that the earth is only five minutes old because that s more comfortable to explain to people. lest you think industry is going to fix this because they don t have the constraints. do you want to know how duke energy shut down the spill at the dan river? the third largest spill in american history. it started on super bowl sunday. it flooded that river with all that toxic slud
experts who have different theories and opinions. i m saying, look, i m not ready to say which is right or wrong. turns out that view is shared by the governor of north carolina who put mr. skvarla in charge of environmental issues for the state. this was pat mccrory in north carolina when he was running for governor in 2008. he was asked by an interviewer about global warming. it s in god s hands. frankly, the world has been warming for a long time and back in the 70s, if you look at the covers of newsweek and time, we were getting cold. it s in god s hands. it s one thing to have an abstract debate about not just climate change but whether or not science is a thing. whether or not science is real. but any abstract concerns about having people who deny science serving in public office became very concrete, very real concerns in north carolina this past super bowl sunday.
concerns in north carolina this past super bowl sunday. when duke energy dumped tens of thousands of tons of toxic coal ash sludge into a 70-mile slick on the dan river. there are 31 other pits just like this one that spilled just like this one that spilled all over the state of north carolina. there s 14 sites across north carolina with what used to be 32 of these big ponds, these big pits full of coal ash. now it s down to 31 of them, of course. this one no longer is a big pit full of coal ash because the coal ash in the pit has run away downstream. when the mccrory administration took over, this was not just a disaster that was waiting to happen in north carolina. this was a disaster that was already in progress when they took office. all of the duke energy coal ash pits, all across the state of north carolina, all of them were already known to be leaking toxins. this was not an allegation that was refuted by the state.
experts who have different theories and opinions. i m saying, look, i m not ready to say which is right or wrong. turns out that view is shared by the governor of north carolina who put mr. skvarla in charge of environmental issues for the state. this was pat mccrory in north carolina when he was running for governor in 2008. he was asked by an interviewer about global warming. it s in god s hands. frankly, the world has been warming for a long time and back in the 70s, if you look at the covers of newsweek and time, we were getting cold. it s in god s hands. it s one thing to have an abstract debate about not just climate change but whether or not science is a thing. whether or not science is real. but any abstract concerns about having people who deny science serving in public office became very concrete, very real concerns in north carolina this past super bowl sunday. when duke energy dumped tens of thousands of tons of toxic coal
energy shut down the spill at the dan river? the third largest spill in american history. it started on super bowl sunday. it flooded that river with all that toxic sludge all day super bowl sunday, all day monday, all day tuesday. they couldn t figure out how to stop the flow of these thousands of tons of toxic sludge into the river. they couldn t stop it. it was not that they couldn t clean up what they had already dumped into the river, they d barely even started that now. they couldn t stop the spill from continuing for days. they couldn t figure out how to stop it. you want to know how they actually finally stopped it? the spill was of a pipe that flowed under a big pit of coal ash. here s the pipe. all the coal ash is on top of it, right? they couldn t get into the coal ash to go fix the pipe. hey, you know, it s really toxic stuff. we don t want to be touching that. so they built themselves a platform over the coal ash pit so they could sort of stage themselves on that platform