Burning cleaner is not the same as reducing "carbon emissions" in the sense of greenhouse gases. If anything, the amount of CO2 resulting from natural gas combustion might be greater than that from coal, because coal burns incompletely, resulting in more carbon monoxide, CO, and less CO2. What you do get from coal is a lot of other crud: particulate matter, burned-up contaminants, etc.
The ultras in any movement are unreasonable, and there seem to be plenty of them in this one. A moderate who speaks up is brave. As you can read in Salman Rushdie's latest, some prominent moderate Muslims were murdered for speaking out against Khomeini's noxious fatwa.
I think you still have the Khaybar story slightly wrong. Khaybar was taken by the Muslims after the Jews of Medina, viewed as a fifth column, were mistreated in various ways (extermination of the males of one tribe, expulsion of another, and the fate of the third not entirely clear). Khaybar was "only" required to pay an annual 50% income tax to the conquerors. A few years later, when it was decreed that none but Muslims could live in Arabia, the Jews of Khaybar were expelled.
Interesting that the first commenter cited Thucydides. I was thinking of the Roman emperor (was it Augustus? probably someone later) who could do nothing but bemoan the loss of his best legions in the forests of Germany. That'd be about the result here. The only way to defeat Pakistan would be to obliterate it--which might involve the incineration of some of our cities too, but hey!
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Burning cleaner is not the same as reducing "carbon emissions" in the sense of greenhouse gases. If anything, the amount of CO2 resulting from natural gas combustion might be greater than that from coal, because coal burns incompletely, resulting in more carbon monoxide, CO, and less CO2. What you do get from coal is a lot of other crud: particulate matter, burned-up contaminants, etc.
The ultras in any movement are unreasonable, and there seem to be plenty of them in this one. A moderate who speaks up is brave. As you can read in Salman Rushdie's latest, some prominent moderate Muslims were murdered for speaking out against Khomeini's noxious fatwa.
I think you still have the Khaybar story slightly wrong. Khaybar was taken by the Muslims after the Jews of Medina, viewed as a fifth column, were mistreated in various ways (extermination of the males of one tribe, expulsion of another, and the fate of the third not entirely clear). Khaybar was "only" required to pay an annual 50% income tax to the conquerors. A few years later, when it was decreed that none but Muslims could live in Arabia, the Jews of Khaybar were expelled.
Interesting that the first commenter cited Thucydides. I was thinking of the Roman emperor (was it Augustus? probably someone later) who could do nothing but bemoan the loss of his best legions in the forests of Germany. That'd be about the result here. The only way to defeat Pakistan would be to obliterate it--which might involve the incineration of some of our cities too, but hey!