Perry County Green Party
The Coal Disaster

It’s being called a huge environmental disaster but, unlike Katrina, the TVA coal ash pond dam collapse disaster was not caused by the environment.  Rather, this disaster was caused by the continued use of a dirty, poisonous fuel used in an outdated and inefficient mode of energy production, coal. Earthen dams holding the toxic materials from burning coal fail all the time, it’s what they do in time.  The reason you may not have heard about it could be the fact that the media tends to down play such disasters and the real disaster of coal is seldom mentioned. 

 

Coal kills, it has a long history of doing so.  It is estimated that over 64 million Americans breathe air that has so much particle pollution that it puts their health at risk.  Coal is estimated to cause 25,000 thousand deaths in the US every year from diseases caused by breathing particles and soot from coal emissions. Besides the microscopic particles linked to asthma and heart disease there are other health affects as well, not to mention the forest killing acid rain.  Coal-fired power plants are the largest single man-made source of mercury pollution in the U.S., the largest contributor of hazardous air pollutants overall. Startling new research shows that one out of every six women of childbearing age in the United States may have blood mercury concentrations high enough to damage a developing fetus putting 630,000 babies at risk.  

 

Coal companies are ruthless too, as one can see by the way they mine the last remnants of the stuff.  They’ve blown more than 500 mountain tops off filling in valleys with more “engineered” fills that compared to the geological forces that created the landscape in the first place are quite puny despite their massive scale.  Coal companies pay no mind to the effects on surrounding communities either beyond PR campaigns such as the current one claiming ‘clean coal technology.’ Coal may even cause the demise of human life on Earth as it is the single largest contributor to global warming.  While 8 homes were swept off of their foundations by the recent coal disaster no injuries were reported but one can bet the toxic mix of arsenic, thallium, uranium, thorium, mercury and cobalt, at more than 10 times the concentration of coal, will have a lasting affect on the health of those living downstream.

 

If you do live in a small town downstream it was likely days later before it turned up in the local paper and then perhaps on the 6^th or 7^th page.  Outside of Tennessee, if you missed its brief mention on national TV, you may not learn anything about it at all from the newspapers.  If this were just another glum warning from intelligence central about the possibility of a terrorist attack sometime in the next 5 years, however, it would likely be on the front page in all the papers.  But coal kills.  It has killed many more Americans than any terrorist and yet we tend to turn our heads or at best briefly note the event before we move on apparently unable to face the inconvenient truth.  King coal is powerful and has been whispering in our ears all our lives just so that we do ignore its crimes.  Its time people awoke and insisted on clean energy, really clean energy.  It’s also time we reduced our appetite for electricity and fossil fuels.  No, nuclear energy is not a solution either as it has the same problems, a horrifically toxic waste we do not know what to do with or how to store safely for the eons it will take for it to be rendered harmless.  It is especially nasty in that its poison is not so easily detected by human senses.

 

The population explosion and expansion of our civilization on planet Earth, more than 6 billion and counting, was made possible by the broad use of fossil fuels and many scientists worry that since they are finite resources  that there may need to be a population contraction once they’ve been used up.  America has been in a position to lead the world toward a greener future for some time now but leaders have ignored the writing on the wall if their policies tell us anything.  In a conversation early in the last century, Thomas Edison once said to Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone, “I’d put my money on solar energy …I hope we don’t have to wait till the oil and coal run out before we tackle that.”

 

The time has come to tackle solar energy in a big way and the economic forces that have been arrayed against all good sense solutions are showing themselves now to be corrupt and wrong about almost everything they have insisted on and got for the last 100 years.  We know we can’t just stop it all overnight but we have no more time to waste.  The scientists can continue to study how to make electricity from the sun ever more efficiently etc. but there is much more to do that does not require a scientist to figure out because they’ve already done it and it’s stuff we as communities can do. 

 

A truly sustainable solution leaving fossil fuels behind will require a considerable redesign in the way we do things and we must if we are to avoid the potential catastrophe of famine. We know that we may be facing climate change and the critical factor for us regarding that is water. So every community should be making sure they are collecting, retaining, slowing and cleaning whatever flow of water they may be blessed with. Then we must address the fact 1/3 the fuel used in the US is used just to get our food to the table, 1400 miles on average. If the trucks stopped rolling we would be hungry very soon as most cities and towns only have about 3-5 days worth of food on the shelves.  The problem: we don’t grow our food locally as humans have for the 4 million years or so before we got to this place.  That relatively simple transformation would take us a long way toward better health and security as well. 

 

By building greenhouses a diverse diet can be grown pretty much anywhere year around.  This can also allow a more horticultural and intensive organic food production system.  We can also clean our waterways and the water used for transporting our human waste utilizing water cleaning plants that turn out to be the very best fuel crops.  We already have the underutilized technologies required for producing liquid and gas fuels from plant, animal and human wastes, methane and ethanol, simply and economically. An important part of what makes such a system sustainable is that it is done at the community scale. By hooking up the waste loops between our animal and plant food production systems with our clean water and fuel production systems we can create sustainable symbiotic relationships that can provide for our future generations and be done with the disaster that is coal.

 

Visit coalspill.com for the latest news on the coal ash spill in Tennessee and Alabama.

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