A Lesson for Stovepipe City: Everything in Climate Change is Connected

The Appalachian region has been supplying American with cheap energy for generations, a duty it has performed with a sense of pride and patriotism.

But while electricity from the region’s coal has been cheap for the rest of us, the price has been extraordinarily high for the people of the mountains.

That price took on a new dimension this week in a peer-reviewed study from the Health Policy Institute at West Virginia University. Researcher Michael Hendryx reports that coal mining costs the region five times more in early deaths than it provides in economic benefits.

Hendryx’s sobering calculation is that the coal industry provides about $8 billion annually in jobs, taxes and other economic benefits, but premature deaths attributed to coal mining and its impacts, including local air and water pollution, cost the region $42 billion.

He qualifies this estimate, saying it’s impossible to calculate these numbers with absolute certainty. But even a cursory look at how coal is extracted in Appalachia – largely now through the incredibly destructive practice of mountaintop removal – leads reasonable people to conclude that Hendryx is on the right track.

I’ll write a great deal about the ongoing Appalachian tragedy in the future, but in this post I’ll focus on the ecology of decision-making in Washington, D.C., that allows national energy policy to be so destructive, even deadly.

The great lesson of global climate change is that everything is connected. The emissions from a coal plant in Iowa, for example, add to the global carbon dioxide emissions that may produce floods in Bangladesh. Or the folks in Iowa may someday suffer bigger floods because of all those new cars about to populate the streets of India.

But if the world is connected, you wouldn’t know it by watching the political process in Washington. It is the Capitol of Compartmentalization, the City of Stovepipes and the Land of a Thousand Fiefdoms. Every topic seems to have its own congressional committee, its own federal agency and its own legislation.

The stovepipes are especially evident right now as Congress moves toward its August recess and President Obama tries to accomplish as much as he can before his honeymoon is over. We are in the Summer of Big Issues before the new congressional and presidential election cycles initiate another long drought on political courage.

For example, in separate legislation, committees, hearings and processes, Congress is considering a climate change bill, a health care bill and an energy bill. It just finished work on a military spending bill and will soon begin work on a major transportation bill.

Leaders are trying to prevent gridlock in this traffic jam of separate issues competing for their time and attention, each important in its own right with its constituents begging for action.

Trouble is, all of these issues are connected. In a rational world, they could not and would not be considered in isolation from one another.

There is no more obvious example than Appalachia, where the adverse impacts of outdated energy policy have impacts on every home. In Appalachia, we see global climate change at its roots while national energy policy sabotages public health and environmental quality for the people living there.

It’s easy for the rest of us to ignore what’s happening in Appalachia – until we realize how connected we really are with the region.

Every mountaintop that’s blown up is connected to every fetus poisoned by mercury pollution from coal-fired power plants, every child who suffers from asthma related to air pollution, and every family victimized by fire, flood or disease attributed to global warming.