In order for this particular entry into this humble political blog to make any sense, you really need to watch the above video.

For the YouTube-a-phobes amongst us, allow me to summarize – during a recent campaign stop in Maumee, OH, Democratic Vice Presidential candidate Joe Biden was flagged down by a young woman who is a campaigner for 1Sky, an environmentalist group whose main focus is to combat global warming. The unnamed young woman asked Biden about the Obama campaign’s feelings towards coal processing in Ohio, considering wind and solar energy plants are already flourishing in the state.

Biden’s off-the-cuff response was alarming to many supporters of the coal industry across the tri-state.

“We are not supporting clean coal,” Biden replied. “Guess what? China is building two every week. Two dirty coal plants and it's polluting the United States. It's causing people to die.”

“No coal plants here in America,” he would later go on to say in the same impromptu interview. The dialogue, by this point, was admittedly muffled – largely by the simultaneous slap of nearby Democratic hands on their own Democratic foreheads.

This fifty-three second, unscripted interview caused an understandable amount of buzz in West Virginia – after all, the coal industry currently provides over 40,000 Mountaineers with jobs, and is responsible for generating 99% of West Virginia’s electricity.

Local Republican politicians were quick to criticize Sen. Biden for his remarks, such as Congresswoman Shelley Moore Capito, who proved her loyalty to the coal industry in May by going to bat for new liquid coal technology at the House of Representatives.

“He was very adamant in his opinion that no clean coal, no coal plants here in America,” Capito said in a recent statement. “To me that's American jobs and West Virginia jobs.”

Republican presidential contender Sen. John McCain also gave a response to the statement, saying that Sen. Obama had also recently mentioned his agenda against the coal industry during an Ohio campaign stop.

However, it seems that Biden’s hurried response to the intrepid young inquisitor goes against his campaign’s established energy plan – one of the tenets of which is to “offer incentives to accelerate private sector investment in commercial scale zero-carbon coal facilities.”

Still, Biden’s remark, no doubt combined with worries caused by the recent banking industry bust, was enough to cause West Virginia coal miners and other members of the industry to worry about our nation’s next leader’s plans for their fossil fuel-centric lifestyles.

To ease these fears, and to make up for his running mate’s ill-advised statement, Sen. Obama created a task force for clean coal jobs this week – one of the charter members of the group being Sen. Jay Rockefeller. He also promised a $1.5 billion investment in clean coal technology to smooth over the ruffled feathers of West Virginia’s coal miners.

All of this – the promised investment, the new task force, and Obama’s renewed campaign focus on the coal industry – all the result of an impromptu response to a young inquiring mind, and a fifty-three second YouTube clip. If we needed any further proof that the voice of one young person can make a difference on a national level, I believe we’ve found it.