Climate Change Shakes King Coal's Throne

Climate Change Shakes King Coal's Throne

Apr 12 - Albuquerque Journal

By NED FARQUHAR

Why are so many people angry about coal? Pollution. Coal is the most carbon-rich energy source in use today, packing about 50 percent more geologic carbon than natural gas, so its combustion contributes heavily to global warming.

But coal doesn't combust itself. It's a mineral, lying underground until someone digs it up and burns it. It has no brain, no arms and legs, and no will.

Perhaps we shouldn't blame coal for its impacts. Instead we can question the industry that keeps avoiding the extra cost of burning it carbon-clean, with far fewer emissions of mercury and sulfur, and the policies that make coal the fuel of choice for electricity generation.

Across the country and across the West, we burn a lot of coal. In fact, nationwide there are about 500 coal plants providing about half our electricity, with another 150 in the planning stages. The president says we are addicted to oil, and he's right. But we are also dependent on cheap, dirty coal. It's a quiet addiction fed through our wall sockets instead of at the gas station.

Still, King Coal's crown is slipping, for a few reasons. First, the King destroys land and water while not sharing the wealth. Hear the words of U.S. Sen. Jim Webb from Virginia, a coal state, in his book "Born Fighting," which I read soon after his surprising election last November. He talks about the historic impact of the coal industry on Appalachia:

"The ever-hungry industrialists had discovered that West Virginia, eastern Kentucky, and southwest Virginia sat atop one huge vein of coal. And so the rape began. ... The people from outside showed up with complicated contracts that the (local folks) could not fully understand. ... The Man got his coal, and the profits it brought when he shipped it out. ... Coal made this part of Appalachia a poverty-stricken basket case."

That's not too different from what some opponents of coal plants in the West are saying today. Opponents of the proposed Desert Rock coal plant here in New Mexico have objected to the fact that a large international coal developer wants huge tax breaks for a conventional coal plant, yet would cart gargantuan profits back to Wall Street.

Meanwhile, nationally, the coal industry has become politically hyperactive, making campaign contributions at about 50 times the average of other industries when measured as a percentage of revenues, according to Jeff Goodell's book, "Big Coal: The Dirty Secret Behind America's Energy Future."

While paying for some politicians' loyalty, however, the industry overlooked consumers.

Western energy customers, like those in California, Oregon, Colorado, New Mexico and Washington, are demanding cleaner energy sources in new laws requiring clean electricity and preventing new conventional coal energy contracts. Recent polls in several western states firmly indicate that the public just doesn't believe the industry's high-budget advertising claim that it's clean and getting cleaner.

This is an industry that won't embrace technological change -- very unAmerican. Industry leaders keep talking about "cleaner coal" or "clean coal," but it turns out they aren't including global warming. Almost none of the planned 150 new plants include available technologies to reduce or eliminate carbon dioxide emissions.

While it supports a single federally supported 10-year multibillion-dollar carbon-clean coal project that will likely fall over of its own weight, the industry is also trying to squeeze conventional projects into being as fast as it can while it has the protection of the current White House. Remember that Vice President Dick Cheney, who chaired the development of the Bush administration's national energy policy in 2001, hails from the biggest coal state of all, Wyoming.

Whether carbon-clean coal options will make economic sense when compared to energy efficiency and renewable energy is not clear -- and the industry knows it. The industry benefits when it can produce cheap and dirty power, and it loses market share when it must pay to pollute.

The nation will probably move toward a carbon-trading program when federal agencies come out from under the Bush administration's control in a couple of years. The Supreme Court, the Congress, and the states are moving. The industry will have to pay for a diminishing number of permits to pollute. If it continues denying that it has the technology to clean up its carbon emissions, which isn't true, it puts its workers and the industry itself at immediate risk.

Kings generally don't embrace economic democracy, so this is one monarchy that may have seen its best days.

Ned Farquhar, a former senior policy adviser to Gov. Bill Richardson, is Mountain West energy/climate advocate for the Natural Resources Defense Council and a board member of Western Progress, a regionalpolicy organization. Contact him or comment at inthewest@comcast.net