The True Face of Mean Coal

There is no escaping the poisonous byproducts of coal combustion. Clean up the smokestack, you end up with solid waste that contaminates the earth; capture CO2 and liquefy it, you still have to pump it into the earth and keep it there. It's like quitting smoking and taking up chewing tobacco instead. You still have to spit.

This truth was brought home by the New York Times today in an excellent article called Hundreds of Coal Ash Dumps, with Virtually No Regulation.

The amount of coal ash has ballooned in part because of increased demand for electricity, but more because air pollution controls have improved.

Contaminants and waste products that once spewed through the coal plants' smokestacks are increasingly captured in the form of solid waste, held in huge piles in 46 states, near cities like Pittsburgh, St. Louis and Tampa, Fla., and on the shores of Lake Erie, Lake Michigan and the Mississippi River.

There are 1300 hundred dumps across the country similar to the one in Tennessee which last month released a billion gallons of toxic fly ash; they contain concentrations of heavy metals that can cause cancer and birth defects; and they remain unregulated and unmonitored because of coal industry campaigns opposing controls.

It's become painfully clear yet again that there's no such thing as clean coal, just Mean Coal.

Coal is a chief culprit of global warming; and now for those who can't quite grasp that, the Times has published a map worth studying. It shows the 67 coal or oil ash waste sites identified by the EPA "where ground water and wells had been contaminated over the past decades with heavy metals and other toxic materials." Global warming aside, coal is a toxic nightmare, and its protectors and boosters are merchants of death.

The addiction to lead in ancient Rome led directly to the fall of the empire. The parallels are instructive, if not chilling:

The Romans were aware that lead could cause serious health problems, even madness and death. However, they were so fond of its diverse uses that they minimized the hazards it posed. Romans of yesteryear, like Americans of today, equated limited exposure to lead with limited risk. What they did not realize was that their everyday low-level exposure to the metal rendered them vulnerable to chronic lead poisoning, even while it spared them the full horrors of acute lead poisoning.....

The result, according to many modern scholars, was the death by slow poisoning of the greatest empire the world has ever known. Symptoms of "plumbism" or lead poisoning were already apparent as early as the first century B.C. Julius Caesar for all his sexual ramblings was unable to beget more than one known offspring. Caesar Augustus, his successor, displayed not only total sterility but also a cold indifference to sex.

Let's hope President-elect Obama, the closest thing we have to a Caesar, will accept the invitation that's just been extended for him to visit the coal ash spill site in Tennessee to see the "true face of coal." Perhaps it will help him realize that his belief in clean coal is wishful thinking.

I got a note today from someone named Kim Choate who tells me that down in Tennessee, it's been raining for three days -- about 12 inches worth. The water is washing the toxic waste downstream, dispersing the poison far and wide. Kim pointed out that the regulators of our modern energy economy have operated up to now believing that "the solution to pollution is dilution."

That game is so over, especially again now that we're getting a good look at the true face of Mean Coal.

Comments

[Kathryn Schwartz]

It amazes me that the myth of clean coal is not adequately discussed in the television news media, however, it does give me hope to see people commenting on just that, even if it is online. We all know that the internet has the ability to affect massive amounts of change, and I hope the issue of clean coal is one of them. If you haven’t yet discovered it, there’s a coalition of many groups dedicated to fighting the misinformation about clean coal. www.powerpastcoal.com has launched a ‘100 Days of Action to Power Past Coal’ campaign, and it’s goal is to provide, through it’s website, the ability for community activists to add their local events and gather information about clean coal.

[LITNUP]

That is like saying because just one bridge collapsed the hysteria produced will scare us into thinking that the infrastrucure of the USA is that of GAZA .. Oh yeah ..... Check out the phycial plant at Southern Illinois University Carbondale and their Clean Coal... IT WORKS... And Barack's state of Ililnois has more BTU in coal than Saudi Arabia has in oil

[David Sassoon - Huffpost Blogger]

I'd think you would consider the idea of the "canary in the coal mine." Many coal miners were saved by paying attention to the little birds when they keeled over. Same principle applies here. And despite what you say, it's not just one incident. The disaster in Tennessee has shined a spotlight on the dangerous status quo -- no regulation, no monitoring, and dozens of sites contaminating human health all across the country. You don't need a dam breach to have a toxic disaster. Here's more detail on specifics from the Times story. It is not hysteria, it is factual and immensely serious.

" In 2007, an E.P.A. report identified 63 sites in 26 states where the water was contaminated by heavy metals from such dumps, including three other Tennessee Valley Authority dumps. Environmental advocacy groups have submitted at least 17 additional cases that they say should be added to that list.

Just last week, a judge approved a $54 million class-action settlement against Constellation Power Generation after it had dumped coal ash for more than a decade in a sand and gravel pit near Gambrills, Md., about 20 miles south of Baltimore, contaminating wells. And Town of Pines, Ind., a hamlet about 40 miles east of Chicago, was declared a Superfund site after wells there were found to be contaminated by ash dumped in a landfill and used to make roads starting in 1983."

[LITNUP]

Thank you

[GrayOwl]

Good (and chilling) points, Mr. Sassoon. The NYT story was informative. But does anyone have a detailed map of where the 1,300 sites are? How about details regarding what regulations, if any, exist -- state by state, if necessary? If there isn't some kind of official national map (sufficiently detailed to be meaningful and readily available to the public), the problems could be far worse than we imagine. What if no one is keeping tabs on all of this? Where are our elected officials who are supposed to watch out for us? (Assumption: Out to lunch, again, and guess who's picking up the tab....)