Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #325558 in Books
• Published on: 2007-04-03
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

Customer Reviews

Big coal, big problem?
There are a number of problems connected with the burning of coal to create electricity. Coal pollutes the atmosphere. Mining coal plays havoc with the environment, especially when the methods used include blowing off the top of mountains and letting the debris wash down the gullies into the rivers and streams. Mining coal can be a dangerous, dirty job. And--as is the case with other fossil fuels--we will, soon or late, run out of coal. And, by the way, this will be sooner than coal executives would have us believe. (See "Coal, reserves" in the excellent index.)

But are these problems unsolvable and/or the price we have to pay to keep the economic engine humming?

Phrased in another way, "The issue is not really whether we have enough coal to provide enough electricity to keep our air conditioners cranked up. We surely do. The issue is, how big a part of America are we willing to sacrifice for this privilege?" (p. 19)

Journalist Jeff Goodell spent three years looking deeply into these questions. He talked to the miners and the coal executives. He rode the trains that haul coal and he went to China where coal is used for everything from making the fire to turn the turbines to cooking the evening meal. He saw a lot of pollution in China and he saw a lot of devastation in West Virginia. He talked to people with black lung and to people who have had part of their property washed down stream because the land above them had been stripped by coal mining. He talked to think tank conservatives who claim that coal is the answer to our dependence on foreign oil; and he talked to environmentalists who believe that the burning of coal is going to trigger an environmental disaster because of all the carbon dioxide being spewed into the atmosphere (not to mention the mercury, lead, chromium, arsenic, sulfur dioxide, soot and "particulates"). He looked at the politics and the economics of coal. He looked at human costs and finally he looked at the future of coal.

What he found is deeply troubling. As the oil patch runs dry we are going to build more coal plants, we are going to use coal to make diesel fuel for our vehicles and we are going to pollute the atmospheric "commons." We and the Chinese and the Russians and others. And it looks like the planet is going to get a lot hotter before we wake up and realize the we can no longer burn fossil fuels for our energy needs. The environmental costs of burning coal simply will not be worth the energy we get.

This is the bottom line that is so very hard for us to appreciate. As Goodell makes clear, the real costs of burning coal--pollution of the environment, health costs, global warming--are largely invisible. The coal companies don't want to pay these costs. They use their political clout to make sure that those costs are paid for by others. And our government is not going to stop burning coal since to do so would give an economic advantage to other nations that continue to burn coal. Meanwhile the amount of pollutants in the atmosphere continues to grow, and our air becomes like the land in the "tragedy of the commons"--used, abused, and eventually despoiled because nobody can be held responsible.

Coal executives like to say that coal brings prosperity. Look at Wyoming. Look at China. But Goodell also has us look at West Virginia. "Over the past 150 years or so, more than 13 billion tons of coal have been carted out the Mountain State. What do West Virginians have to show for it? The lowest median household income in the nation, a literacy rate in the southern coalfields that's about the same as Kabul's, and a generation of young people who are abandoning their home state to seek their fortunes elsewhere." (pp. xx-xxi)

The situation is the same or worse in the coal mining areas of China. Already China is looking to reduce its dependance on coal. They are "building the largest offshore wind farm in the world." They are replacing coal-fired power plants with natural gas, and they've "banned the use of coal for heating and cooking in cities such as Beijing and Shanghai." (p. 230) But of course they are also building more coal burning power plants to generate electricity--as we are.

The race now is on between how many dirty coal burning plants Big Coal can get built before they are stopped by the inevitable legislation to come that will require coal plants not only to scrub their stacks for particulates, but to capture and sequester carbon dioxide.

Goodell looks at the "integrated gasification combined cycle" (IGCC) power plants that are proposed and being built. These plants cook off the impurities in coal and convert the coal to a synthetic gas. The process makes it easier and cheaper to capture CO2 from the coal. He writes, "The difference between an IGCC power plant and a conventional coal plant is sometimes said to be akin to the difference between a Toyota Prius and a Chevrolet Suburban." (p. 210) IGCCs are clearly the coal power plants of the future, but they are expensive to build and so Big Coal prefers to build conventional plants.

What I came away feeling after reading this engagingly written, meticulously researched, and well-documented journalistic tour de force is the sense that things are going to get worse before they get better, and that our children and grandchildren are going to suffer from the ill-effects of burning coal to a degree that will make them wonder what our generations were doing while the atmosphere and the earth burned. And it is they who will paid the economic costs that our politicians and corporate executives are avoiding today.