At a hearing before the state’s Utilities Commission today, here’s what’s on tap, writes the News & Observer:

NC WARN’s star witness is John Blackburn, a former chairman of Duke University’s economics department who was also the university’s provost and chancellor in the 1970s. He has also written two books on renewable energy.

Blackburn will testify that the state can shut down all of its coal-burning power plants in 15 years and meet all its energy needs through a combination of solar energy, wind power, cogeneration and energy efficiency. Cogeneration is the practice of recycling waste heat to generate electricity or heat.

No mention in the story of the role nuclear energy might play in meeting our country’s demands for safe, greenhouse gas-free energy. NC WARN and Mr. Blackburn may not want to talk about it, but the rock star of the climate-change alarmist movement IS talking about nuclear energy. That may make environmentalists nervous. Here’s what NASA’s James Hansen said at UNC Chapel Hill recently, as I detailed in Carolina Journal:

During a January visit to UNC-Chapel Hill to support a Sierra Club-led effort to pressure the university to stop burning coal at its cogeneration plant, Hansen, head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, suggested nuclear as one alternative to replace coal in the nation’s fuel mix.

“If you look at the damage that has been done to humans and the environment by nuclear power and compare that to what’s been done by coal, you’re talking several orders of magnitude,” said Hansen, who famously declared to a Senate committee hearing in 1988 that, “The greenhouse effect has been detected, and it is changing our climate now.”

At his Chapel Hill event in January, Hansen said, “The safest large industry in the United States has been nuclear power. The number of people killed from nuclear power is negligible.”

Nuclear also emits no carbon dioxide — the greenhouse gas that environmental activists say is killing the planet. Coal, which Hansen calls the dirtiest fuel on the planet, does — and he says it should be phased out globally.