Dirty Secret: `Big Coal' Examines the Global Impact of Mining - Bloo
Posted by: "Adam Whaley" byrlip@lineone.net byrlip
Tue Jun 27, 2006 12:01 pm (PST)
``The most dangerous thing about our continued dependence on coal is not
what it does to our lungs, our mountains, or even our climate, but what
it does to our minds,'' Goodell writes. ``It preserves the illusion that
we don't have to change our thinking.''
>
bloomberg.com
Dirty Secret: `Big Coal' Examines the Global Impact of Mining
June 27 (Bloomberg) -- Al Gore was right: Global warming is a scary
thing, judging not only by the critical acclaim greeting Gore's new
documentary, ``An Inconvenient Truth,'' but by the proliferating horror
stories:
Polar bears in Alaska and the Yukon are suddenly turning to cannibalism
as melting ice cuts their food supply.
Pollution clouds, generated by China's power plants, are now crossing
the Pacific to land on western U.S. shores.
Experts are blaming the unusually warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico for
Hurricane Katrina -- even as we buckle down for another hurricane season.
Nightmares like these fill the pages of Jeff Goodell's ``Big Coal,''
which reports on the resurgence of coal -- meaning new power plants and
reactivated mines -- in the face of the terrorist threats to oil, the
flat growth of natural-gas production and the political minefield of
nuclear power.
What does a book about coal's resurgence have to do with global warming?
Apparently, everything.
Coal is cheap and plentiful, writes Goodell, whose 2002 book, ``Our
Story'' was co-written with nine miners rescued after 77 hours in a coal
mine near Quecreek, Pennsylvania. An estimated 1 trillion tons of
recoverable coal exist in the world, including rich seams in Appalachia
and Wyoming's Powder River basin. Overall, the U.S. has more than 20
percent of the stuff, making America, in Goodell's terms, ``the Saudi
Arabia of coal.''
Environmental Havoc
Yet coal mining is far more invasive than oil or gas drilling. Strip
mining wreaks environmental havoc. Coal miners die with heart-rending
regularity (remember Sago?). And the sulfur-dioxide emissions from the
power plants that turn coal to electricity cause heart attacks, asthma
and premature deaths, while mercury poisons fish. On the global-warming
front, carbon- dioxide emissions -- nationwide, coal accounts for 40
percent of CO2 emissions -- trap the sun's heat in the atmosphere,
warming the Earth.
With atmospheric CO2 now at 380 parts per million (and rising 1.5 ppm a
year), and with one-quarter of the planet's CO2 emissions coming from
coal, it's time to stop our dark addiction, Goodell argues:
``Even if every SUV were downsized to a Schwinn, every truck and bus
repowered to burn biodiesel, and every refrigerator retrofitted to run
with solar panels, if we keep burning coal the old-fashioned way, we are
playing Russian roulette with the very thing that makes our life on
earth possible -- a steady, temperate climate.''
Rising Temperature
At the same time, ``the equivalent of 1,400 1,000-megawatt coal-fired
power plants will be built in the world by 2030,'' Goodell tells us,
including a slew in the U.S. Yet CO2 emissions already are so intense
that Earth's temperature has risen 1 degree Fahrenheit during the past
century, especially during the last two decades, and is expected to
increase 2 to 10 degrees by 2100.
Goodell's sometimes achingly funny prose keeps us turning pages through
the science of all this, considering evidence from Greenland ice cores
of ancient periods when the temperature warmed a catastrophic 15 degrees
in less than 10 years.
``In human terms, it was like going to sleep one night in Alaska and
waking up in Costa Rica,'' Goodell writes. En route Goodell fixes his
anti-coal sights on targets like George W. Bush, pointing out how the
president during his 2000 campaign promised to regulate CO2 but reneged;
and how his ``Clear Skies Initiative'' actually left out CO2 altogether,
while putting only loose caps on sulfur dioxide and allowing a trading
system for mercury (a dangerous experiment, considering its toxicity).
Clean-Burning Plants
Drawing from three years of research, Goodell ranges far and wide, from
Quecreek's ``doghole'' to the ``carbon express'' railroads out West
(whose powerful owners have a big stake in coal's resurgence) to Urumqui
in western China. There he found locals planting anabasis shrubs in the
desert to soak up atmospheric CO2, and preparing to trade carbon
credits, as provided under the Kyoto Protocol (which the U.S. wouldn't
sign).
He explains such significant solutions to global warming as high-tech
clean-burning power plants (``akin to the difference between a Toyota
Prius and a Chevrolet Suburban'') and the burial of CO2. But, as Goodell
repeatedly points out, politics and Big Coal remain the immutable forces
in moving America forward on this issue.
``The most dangerous thing about our continued dependence on coal is not
what it does to our lungs, our mountains, or even our climate, but what
it does to our minds,'' Goodell writes. ``It preserves the illusion that
we don't have to change our thinking.''
``Big Coal'' is published by Houghton Mifflin (324 pages, $25.95).
Joan Oleck is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are
her own.)
To contact the writer of this story:
Joan Oleck at joanvalo@aol.com.
Last Updated: June 27, 2006 00:07 EDT |
