The Climate Change Debate In W.Va.

"Clean coal" technology, pursued by West Virginia to maintain its role in the nation's energy mix, is "hugely expensive" and "probably one of the worst ideas ever proposed," a Charleston audience was told Tuesday.

S. Fred Singer, described by The Charleston Gazette as "one of the nation’s most outspoken and controversial climate change skeptics," said that "that humans aren’t making the world warmer, and said state residents shouldn’t try to curb greenhouse gas emissions from coal-fired power plants."

Singer spoke at an evening event "sponsored by Payne Engineering Co., the First Presbyterian Church of Charleston, Blackbird Technology Group of Indiana, and BB&T," the Gazette reports.

Public Broadcasting also covered the forum, reporting that Singer is considered "a sort of Rorschach test for your views on climate change. Environmentalists call him a 'climate change denier' -- like the people who deny the Holocaust. They blame him for working with conservative groups and the energy industry to delay action on climate change."

But Singer found a receptive audience Tuesday, which "listened eagerly as Singer gave his hour-long speech and took pot-shots at Al Gore, climate scientists and even his former friends in the oil industry, who he says are only admitting now to climate change because they see how can make money off it," the report said.

Singer is also "the founder of the Science & Environmental Policy Project, which disputes the prevailing wisdom on climate change," Public Broadcasting reports.