Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming (25 page)

Or perhaps not. For people living in the disappearing Appalachian Mountains, coal’s currency is an unavoidable reality. As Jeff Goodell reports in
Big Coal
, mining by mountaintop removal has destroyed more than seven hundred miles of streams and “turned about 400,000 acres of some of the world’s most biologically rich temperate rainforest into a flat, barren wasteland.” After a century in which coal mining accidents killed 100,000 people and black lung claimed the lives of 200,000 more, the death toll continues. In January 2006, for example, seventeen men died in Appalachian coal mines.

Coal’s resurgence—or maybe it’s just persistence—is based on three things. First, some of the biggest and politically most influential players in the United States, from coal mining firms to railroads and electrical utilities, are heavily invested in coal and don’t want to give it up. Second, at a time when the world’s foremost experts are warning about “peak oil,” the coming collapse in supplies of both conventional oil and natural gas, the world supply of coal is to some a reassuring backstop. According to
Big Coal
, the United States alone has known coal reserves amounting to more than 270 billion tons, enough to meet current U.S. consumption for the next 250 years. Third, America has led the world with its de facto declaration that given a choice between short-term profits and the long-term viability of the planet, profits rule. So even though coal-fired electrical plants already produce 40 percent of all U.S. greenhouse gases, and even though that makes the United States the largest national source of greenhouse gases in the world, the current strategy is to continue mining, moving, and burning coal at a rate redoubled from the dangerous past.

The implications are immediately obvious. When burning coal to provide electricity is already the single largest source of increasingly dangerous concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, adding to that source will add to the problem— at a time when we desperately need to be turning our climate supertanker around. Besides, America sets the pace for the world. Despite periodic criticism from Europe and infrequent resistance from some developing nations, the world looks to the United States for leadership and the peoples of the world struggle to emulate America. So if America, with one of the highest standards of living on the planet, says that it cannot afford to give up its addiction to coal, there is no reason to hope that any other country—especially any developing country—will struggle to reduce its dependency either.

On the contrary, the International Energy Agency estimated in 2005 that fourteen hundred 1,000 -megawatt coal-fired power plants would be built somewhere in the world by 2030. In
Big Coal,
Jeff Goodell describes how that might complicate our collective future: “Right now about one quarter of the world’s CO2 emissions come from coal. If we go ahead with these new coal plants, they will add roughly 570 billion tons of CO2 to the atmosphere over the life of the plants. (To put that in perspective, 570 billion tons is about as much CO2 as released by all the coal burned in the last 250 years.) If that happens, our chances of stabilizing the climate are virtually zero.” The great thing about all this (if you’re a coal company) is that politically, the problem is easily blamed on somebody else. Half of those fourteen hundred proposed coal plants will be built in China, a nation of 1.3 billion people struggling to pull itself out of poverty.

Goodell does a good job of explaining why U.S. coal executives and certain politicians find it so convenient to criticize the world’s most populous country: “China’s coal habit gives Big Coal supporters in the United States moral cover to argue that taking any meaningful action to limit CO2 emissions will, as President Bush put it in 2005, ‘wreck our economy.’ After all, why should America put itself at an economic disadvantage to save the planet if the Chinese won’t stop burning coal, too?” Unfortunately, Goodell goes on, the finger of blame points both ways:

Chinese leaders understand very well that the reason global warming threatens the stability of the planet today is because the industrialization of the West—those 150 blissful years of burning fossil fuels—loaded up the atmosphere with CO2. They also are quite aware that the average American is thirty times richer than the average Chinese, and they don’t hesitate to remind people of it. As one Chinese delegate involved in negotiations over the Kyoto Protocol put it, “What [the developed nations] are doing is luxury emissions. What we are doing is survival emissions.”

You can see the arguments for inaction piling up on one another. America can’t stop burning coal without hurting the already faltering economy. (As Frank Maisano might say, it’s just not practical.) But China can’t stop burning coal without endangering an already impoverished population. And the sorry performance of each country renders any progressive effort by the other irrelevant. It’s like a childish argument about littering: “There’s no point in me putting my litter in a trash bin because everyone else is still throwing theirs on the ground.” That’s tantamount to saying that there is no point in showing leadership or in doing the right thing merely because it’s the right thing to do. Both China and the United States are implying that until they can guarantee that everyone else is doing the right thing, they intend to continue being irresponsible, regardless of the path of destruction that sets for the Earth.

The litter analogy is appropriate, because that’s what Big Coal is doing: littering. That’s what we’re all doing when we loft our emissions into the air, whether those wastes come from our cars, from the energy we burn to heat and light our homes, or from the emissions that are created in growing our food and transporting everything we consume. When we put our garbage on the curb, we understand that it costs money for someone to collect that garbage and deal with it safely, and we pay our taxes to cover that cost. But we don’t pay the cost of dumping our greenhouse gas garbage into the atmosphere, and we don’t ask the world’s richest corporations to do so, either.

We have been hearing more and more lately about the coal industry’s intentions to stop dumping its garbage skyward. We’ve been hearing about “carbon capture and storage,” in which energy producers capture carbon dioxide in the production process and pump it into depleted oil and gas reservoirs, unmineable coal seams, deep saline formations, or the deep ocean for safekeeping. The theory, as yet mostly untested, is that carbon dioxide pumped and pressurized becomes heavier than air, reducing the likelihood of serious leakage, even if the capping system fails. Proponents theorize further that sequestering carbon in this way would allow us to go on burning all 270 billion tons of American coal—and, for that matter, the entire contents of the Canadian tar sands—without ever having to worry about its effect on climate.

In the current circumstances, however, the whole notion of sequestering carbon is a load of codswallop. In fact that would be the fairest—and the most polite—way to describe the whole notion of “clean coal.” Consider this: the Union of Concerned Scientists offers these statistics in reference to what it calls the average 500-megawatt coal plant. On the bright side, this “average” plant produces 3.5 billion kilowatt-hours per year, enough to power a city of about 140,000 people, using 1.4 million tons of coal, 2.2 billion gallons of water, and 146,000 tons of limestone in the process. Then this “clean” coal plant produces the following toxins:

• 10,000 tons of sulfur dioxide, the main component in acid rain;

• 10,200 tons of nitrogen oxide, a major cause of smog and a contributor to acid rain;

• 3.7 million tons of carbon dioxide;

• 500 tons of small particles, a major contributor to lung disease;

• 220 tons of hydrocarbons, smog-producing particles of unburnt fuel;

• 720 tons of carbon monoxide, a greenhouse gas that is also poisonous to humans;

• 125,000 tons of ash and 193,000 tons of sludge from the smokestack scrubber. The ash and sludge consist of coal ash, limestone, and many pollutants, including toxic metals such as lead and mercury. (A coal-ash sludge pond broke through its containment wall in Tennessee in December 2008, knocking a house off its foundation and spreading toxic, heavy-metal-ridden fluid over 400 acres of land); and

• 225 pounds of arsenic, 114 pounds of lead, 4 pounds of cadmium, and many other toxic heavy metals.

There is no question that today’s new coal plants are cleaner than those built a century ago. Politicians of both stripes should look back proudly on environmental regulations of the 1970s and the U.S. Clean Air Act of the early 1990s. But just because coal plants are better than before is no justification for an Orwellian redefinition of the word “clean.”

That, however, doesn’t stop the spinners from trying. Brace-well & Giuliani’s Frank Maisano boasted in a December 22, 2008, newsletter that a new coal plant in Florence County, South Carolina, would produce “less than 100 pounds per year” of mercury, which tends to concentrate in fish and then cause birth defects, brain damage, and other ailments in anyone who later eats that fish. For those who are trying to keep track, one hundred pounds is more mercury than you would find in 5 million compact fluorescent lightbulbs. And, of course, the light bulbs can be disposed of responsibly, while the coal plants are spraying mercury into the air.

Once again this list of toxins is the expected output from one 500 -megawatt plant (of which the Chinese are currently commissioning two per week). At least half the plants, which in the United States have an average age of thirty-five years, are worse. New plants—those built with the most recent technology that government might demand—burn cleaner than old plants, but that doesn’t make any coal clean.

The idea that coal can be burnt cleanly or safely in a warming world, now or soon, is a fiction. The coal companies fight desperately against any effort to restrict toxic emissions, and while they talk a good game on the notion of carbon capture, anyone compelled to speak truthfully agrees that the technology is decades away.
New Scientist
magazine gave a realistic sense of the timeline and anticipated costs in a March 2008 feature titled “Can Coal Live Up to Its Clean Promise?”
New Scientist
reported, “A study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology called
The Future of Coal,
published last year, suggests that the first commercial CCS [carbon capture and storage] plants won’t be on stream until 2030 at the earliest. Thomas Kuhn of the Edison Electric Institute, which represents most U.S. power generators, half of whose fuel is coal, takes a similar line. In September, he told a House Select Committee that commercial deployment of CCS for emissions from large coal-burning power stations will require 25 years of R&D and cost about $20 billion.” After a press conference with James Hansen, the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, on June 1, 2007, the Environmental News Service carried a headline that read, “Earth’s Climate Approaches a Dangerous Tipping Point.” In the copy they went on to describe a “dangerous and irreversible” tipping point, and Hansen did not predict it happening in twenty-five years. He mentioned 2016 but implied that it might come sooner.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology academics who authored
The Future of Coal
also pointed out that as of the 2007 conclusion of their study, there wasn’t a single carbon-capture demonstration project, experimental or otherwise, in any coal-fired facility anywhere in the world. The largest sequestration project of any kind was in the Sleipner gas field in the North Sea, and it was successfully pumping one million tons of carbon dioxide a year into saline aquifers under the ocean—a handsome-sounding total until you consider that U.S. coal-fired utilities alone are currently broadcasting 1,500 times that amount (1.5 billion tons) into the atmosphere every year.

David Ratcliffe, CEO of Southern Company, the second-largest emitter of greenhouse gas from coal in the United States, summarized the challenges of carbon sequestration in an interview on the PBS Frontline documentary
America’s Addiction to
Coal.
Ratcliffe said, “I think the truth is, is that we don’t know where we have storage capability in this nation at this time. We haven’t even come close to defining what will be required in storage, what are the legal liabilities and what are the permitting requirements, much less the infrastructure needed to develop that storage and move the carbon, the CO2, into that storage, pipelines or trucks or whatever that is.” Given these hurdles you might wonder where the public got the impression that freshly scrubbed coal is the order of the day or that all new plants are carbon-capture ready or that clean coal is a realistic part of a responsible and healthy energy future.

Well, once again we’ve been had. We have been Astroturfed by some of the biggest players in the business. As you will read in the coming pages, a reasonable-sounding group called Americans for Balanced Energy Choices spent US$40 million during the last presidential election ensuring that the words “clean coal” were on the lips of every candidate and the screen of every television broadcast for months at a time. These people’s idea of clean coal is the same as that of a badly organized college freshman looking through a stinking laundry pile for “clean” underwear. But as James Hansen said two years ago, the current circumstances don’t argue for the efficacy of half measures—or for the intelligence of self-delusion. It makes no sense to pursue a self-destructive policy just because it is affordable. Truly clean coal may one day be possible. Carbon sequestration may one day be practical and cost-competitive. But telling Americans that clean coal is burning in their neighborhood power plant today is a fiction that can only do us all a great deal of damage.

“IF PREDICTING THE weather were easy, we’d never be caught in the rain without an umbrella. Predicting weather conditions a day or two in advance is hard enough . . . so just imagine how hard it is to forecast what our climate will be 75 to 100 years in the future.” Here you have an example of what the comedian Stephen Colbert calls truthiness. If you don’t look too closely at the factual underpinning of that statement, it seems to make perfect sense. It seems true, on the face of it. But it confuses weather with climate and it lays out the supposition that because something is difficult or complicated (anticipating global climate change), there is no reason to try, or at least no reason to listen to the incredibly intelligent people who are doing a Nobel Prize-winning job.