Mountaintop-removal mines, such as this one in southeastern West Virginia, have destroyed 

 more than 700 miles of streams and at least 400,000 acres of forest throughout Appalachia. 

 Workers blast away the uppermost 800 to 1,000 feet of rock to expose layers of coal within, 

 dumping rocky debris into nearby valleys and streams. Local residents often suffer noise, 

 dust, polluted groundwater and rivers, flooding, and lowered property values. Once such 

 mines close, they are replanted with grasses and trees, then left to regenerate as wilder- 

 ness; some have been developed as golf courses, factories, or other facilities. 



Big Coal frequently argues that today's coal boom 

 is not like coal booms of the past. And in some 

 ways, that's true. Mining practices in some regions 

 have vastly improved, and the industry is safer than 

 it was thirty years ago. Emissions of sulfur dioxide 

 and nitrogen dioxide at new coal plants are much 

 lower than they are at old plants. "Increasingly 

 clean" is the industry's favorite sound bite. 



But the truth of the phrase leans heavily on the 

 word "increasingly." The scrubbers on new coal 

 plants might be better, but the plants still release plen- 

 ty of arsenic, cadmium, lead, mercury, sulfur diox- 

 ide, and soot particles. They still require prodigious 

 amounts of water for cooling, and generate millions 

 of tons of coal ash, laden with heavy metals. Nor 

 does "increasingly clean" exactly describe the moun- 

 tains of Appalachia being blasted away to supply the 

 fuel for the new plants. Mountaintop-removal min- 

 ing, as this practice is called, is a recent innovation. 



And many of the new coal plants are much like ear- 

 lier generations of plants in one crucial way: they, too, 

 discharge hundreds of millions of tons of C0 2 into 

 the atmosphere. Prairie State, for instance, will emit 

 more than 1 1 million tons of C0 2 a year, only mar- 

 ginally less than a plant of similar size built thirty years 

 ago. That is why the coal boom is so alarming. 



Right now about one quarter of the world's CO, 

 emissions come from coal-burning power plants; all 

 the world's uses of coal together account for about 40 



percent of emitted C0 2 . The 1,350 gigawatts of new 

 coal-fired generating capacity projected for construc- 

 tion in the next twenty-four years will, if built, add 

 roughly 572 billion tons of C0 2 to the atmosphere 

 during the new plants' sixty-year operating lives. That 

 is about as much C0 2 as was released by all the coal 

 burned by everyone, for every purpose, during the 

 past 250 years. Adding that much C0 2 to the atmo- 

 sphere will make it much harder to limit global warm- 

 ing to the relatively "safe" increase of 3.5 degrees F. 



Ironically — though many in the coal industry 

 deny the reality of climate change — global warming 

 poses the biggest threat to the hegemony of cheap 

 coal. Almost everyone in the industry acknowledges 

 that in the next decade or so, laws that cap C0 2 emis- 

 sions will be passed in the U.S. So, in a perverse way, 

 it is precisely the likelihood of new laws that is fuel- 

 ing the current mad dash to throw up coal plants. The 

 reasoning goes like this: If new plants aren't approved 

 and built before power companies are forced to pay 

 for releasing CO-,, energy costs will go up, and coal 

 plants will be underbid by wind turbines, natural gas 

 plants, and other ways of generating electricity that 

 have less carbon liability. What's going on now is not 

 exactly a land grab — it's an atmosphere grab. 



"Cheap" coal also wouldn't seem such a bargain if 

 its numerous hidden costs were calculated into the 

 price of pow er rather than off-loaded onto the pub- 

 lic, as they now are. Those costs include the blighted 



May 2006 NATUR.M HISTOtUf 



39 



