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.

The truth of this was brought home again today in the NY Times in an excellent story on the coal ash situation in America 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.The coal industry has even been selling the dangerous fly ash as "filler" -- for agricultural land, for golf courses, and for construction. They've been laundering poison.

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

It is a chief culprit of global warming; and now for those who can't quite grasp that, the New York 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.

Last June I published a piece on how 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 (pdf) 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.