Canary in the Coal Mine

Canary in the Coal Mine
December 13, 2008 (NewEnergyNews)
Anne B. Butterfield


A canary flies into an edifice of boldface type with various facts about coal, then falls splat to the ground. This is on the website of the Reality campaign which has been televising ads about the nonexistence of “clean coal”. The signature bird has an “x” for an eye to suggest, no doubt, being banged upside the head.

We get it: our reality is the canary in the coal mine.

Reality is also taking a beating from politicians representing us here in Colorado.

Last week, our Senator Ken Salazar and his brother Congressman John Salazar made reassuring remarks about the future of coal to the mining people of Craig up in Moffat County. Through Commissioner Tom Gray, the county offered a public outcry about how, with all the new Democrats in power in Washington, renewable energy was going to knock the stuffing out of coal’s domination in the electric power business – and that they in turn would “suffer”.

It is hard to see how an industry fueling half the nation’s electricity supply might suffer anytime soon, but if it does, the moral atrocity of mountaintop removal in Appalachia should end first. The people of Craig seem to be jumping to conclusions, with themselves mostly in mind.

Let’s talk about suffering. Polar bears are already drowning and starving as the sea ice they need to survive disappears. And small islands around the globe are predicted to be swamped soon by seas rising from global warming, triggered by atmospheric carbon levels as low as 400 parts per million. Our current level is 385 ppm; at 2ppm gain each year; that means less than ten years until islands like the Maldives become uninhabitable. When extreme weather renders coastal zones around the world uninhabitable, as happened in New Orleans, twice the population of the United States can face suffering. Consider the suffering when oceans become more acidic by absorbing CO2, with coral reefs and fisheries continuing to die off.

Let’s hope that the good people of Craig will think of suffering globally as they consider their own.

Because of the grim link between burning coal and the climate crisis, John Salazar reassured Moffat County by saying he wanted to make sure the federal government fully funds “clean coal” technology, which would inject captured, compressed CO2 miles underground. This is the “clean coal” technical system that is used at no power plant yet in the United States. It’s safe to say it won’t be broadly deployed soon enough to address the warming crisis or be much help to coal miners’ prospects.

It is ironic that John Salazar spoke bravely for clean coal, because just last month, he wrote to Governor Ritter about the well-founded panic of the people of Huerfano County where extraction of coal bed methane has led to explosions and water contamination. Until ordered to stop last year, the Petroglyph Company was pumping out ground water to get at the methane, which in turn seeped into wells and water lines. The seepage continues. John Salazar needs to reflect that the crisis in Walsenburg (and everywhere that new gas drilling has led to a rash of public health complaints) is what communities might face if injection of compressed CO2 is tried broadly. There are always mishaps when messing with geology, and when CO2 gets loose in concentrations it is toxic and lethal.

The Salazars’ assurances about coal’s long run viability through “clean coal” are in line with the contributions they have taken from the industry – over $90,000 for Ken the Senator, and $28,000 for John the Representative. While their totals are less than the worst, they are more than many senators’ from bigger coal states. The Udall brothers’ takes are $13,000 for incoming Senator Mark Udall, and $6500 for Representative Tom Udall. Campaign funds from the coal lobby can be tracked at Follow the Coal Money.

Emily Dickinson said; “Hope is the thing in feathers that perches in the soul.” If reality can be featured as a feathered being that is knocked senseless with an x for its eye, it can also seize on terrific, healing outcomes, flying to new heights. Surely our nation can decide that when it comes to coal it should no longer be simply burned, and burned away -- instead it should be transformed into steel and oh so many wind turbines.

Break aways:

When extreme weather renders coastal zones around the world uninhabitable, as happened in New Orleans, twice the population of the United States can face suffering.

It is hard to see how an industry fueling half the nation’s electricity supply might suffer anytime soon, but if it does, the moral atrocity of mountaintop removal in Appalachia should be first. The people of Craig seem to be jumping ahead fast, and with only themselves in mind.

Crash test dummies

Crash test dummies
Anne B. Butterfield
November 16, 2008 (Daily Camera)

On Nov. 4, we the people threw off the chains of our racist past by electing Barack Obama. It's good to kick off an evil master -- but it's imperative to note that in this election we gave up racism more easily than our obedience to big oil and other big shots in the drama of crony capitalism. We've been flailed around like crash test dummies, asked to do what big oil and gas and the big three auto companies tell us.

Consider a few voter issues:

Last week Coloradans obeyed the $11 million ad campaign put forth by oil and gas companies to defeat Amendment 58, a measure in which our severance tax on oil and gas would no longer be offset by credits on property taxes. It was assailed by claims that the tax would be passed "straight through" to grocery bills and prices at the pump. It was never true. And in the off-chance that wholesale market would allow the small cost to bleed through to retail, the cost would have been well spent leveraging our soon-to-end fossil fuel economy toward a new clean energy economy. It went down by a 16 percent margin.

We were warned -- in a Camera opinion by former Boulderite and renowned oil researcher Antonia Juhasz, writing about California's Prop 87. Offered just two years ago, Prop 87 aimed to impose a small fee per barrel of oil drilled within that state and direct the funds to investments in alternative energy. Starting with a strong popular advantage, it lost by a 10 percent margin after a $100 million campaign funded by Big Oil.

How did our nation's most assertively green state succumb to the snake oil of Prop 87?

Happily, 24 months later, California saw through a ruse presented by T. Boone Pickens in Proposition 10 that would have made California sell bonds to subsidize the sale of cars and trucks powered by natural gas, a fossil fuel produced by a Pickens company. Pickens has been good at promoting wind energy and even scoffing at more drilling for oil, but Prop 10 nonetheless aimed to shift our automotive sector from dependence on one declining fossil fuel to another. Electrification of transportation continues to be the best move, especially for freight which needs to be reborn on a refurbished rail system.

Barack Obama has been reminding us that power never gives up without a fight, which we can see in these fights put up by fossil fuel interests. Recently also, the Big Three automakers have wielded their power in a way that begs new terms to describe stupidity. Denying the obvious signs that peak oil is upon us, the Big Three have perversely continued to badger Congress and the White House against higher CAFE standards, even litigating against states' clean car mandates. The money spent could have gone to innovation. General Motor could be profitable now had it not killed its popular electric car program in California in 2003. Instead, it is going belly up because suburbanites no longer want Suburbans.

We can't blame the United Auto Workers. In a poll in 2002, 80 percent of UAW households blew off industry fumes about higher CAFE standards costing jobs and adding hundreds to the price of cars. Most Michiganders and 84 percent of UAW households favored a new average standard of 40 miles per gallon by 2012. Why did elected officials crony up to big Auto and let Michigan and the whole nation down?

We the people have awakened to the benefits of a new energy economy, with virtually all Democrats, three-quarters of independents and 58 percent of Republicans indicating in a new Zogby poll that clean energy is important to lifting the nation's economy. Yet we are waiting for our leaders to do the right thing with the automakers' crisis and the climate crisis; we are even waiting for ourselves to get the courage to tax Big Oil so we can fund our future. It's time to tell these industries, "You're not the boss of me."