Foreign Policy Blogs

Coal – Besides Carbon Dioxide, There's …

First of all, I have to apologize for being off the air for so long. There’s a seven-year-old kid in the picture and Christmas, plus getting away for the last five days for some R & R for us, has all been a little consuming. I should’ve put some posts in the can prior to getting so busy, but I was swept up in the maelstrom of the holidays.

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Now to some serious business, I’m afraid. We here at the blog and the entire large (and growing) community fighting global warming are well aware of the role of fossil fuel combustion in the production of greenhouse gases. Coal is, of course, the greatest culprit in the production of carbon dioxide. The magisterial Big Coal by Jeff Goodell has three parts that describe the depredations of coal: The Dig, The Burn, The Heat. What we so often forget, in our focus on the threat of catastrophic climate change, are the dire effects of coal mining , the Dig , for the communities where the mines are situated.

On December 22, as you no doubt are well aware by now, a dam broke at a Tennessee Valley Authority coal-fired power plant and released “more than 1 billion gallons of coal ash sludge” according to “The Tennessean” here. That article and this, from the “NY Times,” have a lot to report on the toxicity of the sludge. For a little more of the bigger picture on coal ash, see (and hear) Tennessee Spill: The Exxon Valdez Of Coal Ash? from NPR. “Coal ash is the stuff that’s left over after coal-fired power plants generate electricity and strip out pollutants. Plants produce about 130 million tons of it every year.”

What pollutants don’t get stripped out? Mercury is one critical one. See this report from the consortium of Northeast US states fighting air pollution. Do you eat fish? You probably know then about the dangers of mercury. If not, see this report from NRDC.

Do we really need to expose ourselves, day in and day out, year after year, to the extraordinary environmental and health problems associated with burning coal? The short answer is: Of course not! As I’ve pointed out many times here, renewables are here now, they’re growing in their ability to provide all of our energy needs, and we will be fools, frankly, to pursue any other path for energy generation.

There are other compelling reasons to get away from coal. I’ve written here on a number of occasions about the crime of mountain-top removal mining, and the devastation it causes to communities and to the extraordinary ecology of Appalachia. Here is a blockbuster article, Mining the Mountains, from “Smithsonian Magazine.” Let me leave you with a quote from the article. If this isn’t insane, criminal behavior, then I, for one, don’t know what is.

“Since the mid-1990s, coal companies have pulverized Appalachian mountaintops in West Virginia, Kentucky, Virginia and Tennessee. Peaks formed hundreds of millions of years ago are obliterated in months. Forests that survived the last ice age are chopped down and burned. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that by 2012, two decades of mountaintop removal will have destroyed or degraded 11.5 percent of the forests in those four states, an area larger than Delaware. Rubble and waste will have buried more than 1,000 miles of streams.”

 

Author

Bill Hewitt

Bill Hewitt has been an environmental activist and professional for nearly 25 years. He was deeply involved in the battle to curtail acid rain, and was also a Sierra Club leader in New York City. He spent 11 years in public affairs for the NY State Department of Environmental Conservation, and worked on environmental issues for two NYC mayoral campaigns and a presidential campaign. He is a writer and editor and is the principal of Hewitt Communications. He has an M.S. in international affairs, has taught political science at Pace University, and has graduate and continuing education classes on climate change, sustainability, and energy and the environment at The Center for Global Affairs at NYU. His book, "A Newer World - Politics, Money, Technology, and What’s Really Being Done to Solve the Climate Crisis," will be out from the University Press of New England in December.



Areas of Focus:
the policy, politics, science and economics of environmental protection, sustainability, energy and climate change

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