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  • From: Nicholas Roberts <nicholas@themediasociety.org>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [permaculture] Foes of Mountaintop Removal Have No Ally in the White House
  • Date: Mon, 16 Feb 2009 15:41:55 +1100

Foes of Mountaintop Removal Have No Ally in the White House
The Myth of Clean Coal
http://www.counterpunch.org/frank02132009.html

By JOSHUA FRANK

Barack Obama seems to be following a dirty legacy when it comes to his
official energy policy, a policy that has left Appalachia with fewer
mountaintops every year.

The price of oil per barrel fluctuated dramatically in the past year,
and the U.S.'s dependency on foreign crude has become less stable as
tensions in the Middle East have escalated. Over his long campaign,
Obama laid out his strategy on how to deal with the crisis, which has
been exacerbated by the war in Iraq and the potential confrontation
with Iran, not to mention the oil speculator's dubious role in the
money game. But sadly Obama has been echoing old solutions to our new
21st century environmental troubles. Mainly, where is our energy going
to come from if oil supplies dwindle or prices skyrocket again? And
how will this all affect the dire reality of climate change?

President Obama supports an array of neoliberal strategies to deal
with the country's volatile energy situation. He is not opposed to the
prospect of nuclear power, endorses capping-and-trading the coal
industry's pollution output, and supports liquefied coal.

Well, that's a maybe on the latter.

"Senator Obama supports ... investing in technology that could make
coal a clean-burning source of energy," Obama stated an email sent out
by his campaign in June 2007. "However, unless and until this
technology is perfected, Senator Obama will not support the
development of any coal-to-liquid fuels unless they emit at least 20
percent less life-cycle carbon than conventional fuels."

You did not just read a lofty proclamation from the new White House
change agent, but a well-crafted rationale meant to appease the
environmental movement. Meanwhile, back in his Senate days, Obama's
record relays a much different position on the issue.

It was only six months before the aforementioned email that Republican
Senator Jim Bunning and Obama introduced the Coal-to-Liquid Fuel
Promotion Act of 2007. The bill, introduced in January 2007, was
referred to the Senate committee on finance and would have amended the
Energy Policy Act of 2005 as well as the Energy Policy and
Conservation Act to evaluate the feasibility of including coal-to-oil
fuels in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and provide incentives for
research and plant construction.
Shortly after the introduction of the bill, Tommy Vietor, Obama's
spokesman, defended the senator's proposal, "Illinois basin coal has
more untapped energy potential than the oil reserves of Saudi Arabia
and Kuwait combined. Senator Obama believes it is crucial that we
invest in technologies to use these resources to reduce our dependence
on foreign oil."
It was at the onset of the Nazi era that coal-to-liquid technology
came to the forefront of modern energy science. In the latter part of
the 1920s, German researchers Franz Fischer and Hans Tropsch developed
the initial processes to liquify the dark rock into fuel. The
procedure was utilized throughout World War II by both Germany and
Japan. In fact, coal-to-liquid technology largely fueled Hitler's
bloody campaigns throughout Europe, as Germany had little petroleum
reserves but held vast amounts of coal deposits throughout the
country. Not too unlike the United States' fossil fuel conundrum of
today.

By 1930, Fischer and Tropsch had applied for several U.S. patents, yet
it wasn't until earlier last summer that the first U.S. coal-to-liquid
plant was set for construction in West Virginia. But while liquid coal
may help replace petroleum based fossil fuels, it is certainly not an
answer to global warming.

"The total emissions rate for oil and gas fuels is about 27 pounds of
carbon dioxide per gallon, counting both production and use," states
the Natural Resource Defense Council. "[T]he estimated total emissions
from coal-derived fuel is more like 50 pounds of carbon dioxide per
gallon -- nearly twice as much."

Has Obama had a change of heart, or has he just flip-flopped around
like a suffocating trout for political leverage? The answer to that
question may reside along the nuanced path we are getting all too used
to seeing President Obama traverse these days. As his presidential
campaign website read in late October 2008:

"Obama will significantly increase the resources devoted to the
commercialization and deployment of low-carbon coal technologies.
Obama will consider whatever policy tools are necessary, including
standards that ban new traditional coal facilities, to ensure that we
move quickly to commercialize and deploy low carbon coal technology."

The apartheid government of South Africa was the first to use liquid
coal for motor vehicles, and it seems, despite the "low carbon coal"
rhetoric, that Obama may be poised to carry on the dirty legacy of
liquid coal.

The move from foreign oil to locally mined coal, "low carbon" or
otherwise (no coal energy has zero carbon emissions), would only
change the dynamics of the U.S.'s massive energy consumption, not its
habits, which is at the heart of our current energy woes.

Plus the coal has to come from somewhere. As a result of our
consumptive lifestyles, the mountaintops of the Appalachia region,
from Tennessee up to the heart of West Virginia, are being ravaged by
the coal industry -- an industry that cares little about the welfare
of people or the land that it is adversely affecting with its
industrial mining operations.

The concept of "clean coal" is nothing more than unabashed greenwashing.

The debris from the mining pits, often 500 feet deep, produce toxic
waste that is then dumped in nearby valleys, polluting rivers and
poisoning local communities downstream. No state or federal agencies
are tracking the cumulative effect of the aptly named "mountaintop
removal," where entire peaks are being blown apart, only to expose
tiny seams of the precious black rock.

There has been little to no oversight of the wholesale destruction of
these mountains and Obama has not addressed the ruin in any of their
bullet point policy papers on "clean coal." Any new coal burning
technology, whether it be liquidification or otherwise, would surely
rely on the continuation of such brutal methods of extraction, and
carbon output would still be significant. And it is not just the
burning of coal that is damaging to the environment.

On December 22, 2008, a coal slurry impoundment at the Tennessee
Valley Authority's Kingston coal fired power plant in Harriman,
Tennessee spilled more than 500 million gallons of toxic coal ash into
the Tennessee River.

The epic spill was over 40 times bigger than the Exxon Valdez in
Alaska. Approximately 525 million gallons of black coal ash flowed
into tributaries of the Tennessee River - the water supply for
Chattanooga and millions of people living downstream in Alabama and
Kentucky. The true adverse effects of the spill are still not known.

The fight in West Virginia to stop mountaintop removal has been
heating up in the past few weeks as 13 radical environmentalists, led
my veteran activist, Mike Roselle, protested by chaining themselves to
bulldozers at the Massey Energy Corp. site in Raleigh County on
February 3. The group was arrested and cited for trespassing on
private property.

"Trespassing is certainly a serious offense, but destroying a mountain
is more serious," Roselle said of the arrests. "I am going to be here
until this issue is resolved. This is a serious environmental crisis
that we face [today]."

During his confirmation hearings, U.S. Secretary of the Interior, Ken
Salazar, was asked about how the Obama administration would handle US
coal production.

"The fact of the matter is it powers much of America and there are
lots of jobs it creates," said Salazar, who is no foe of the mining
industry. "The challenge is how we create clean coal. I believe that
we will move forward with the funding of some of those demonstration
projects so we can find ways to burn coal that don't contribute to
climate change."
And so the rhetoric spins.

President Obama may receive high marks from the League of Conservation
Voters and be touted by the Sierra Club for being marginally better
than his predecessor on the environment, but when it comes to his
position on the U.S.'s coal extracting future, the president's
position is not only wrong, it is absolutely disastrous.

Joshua Frank is co-editor of Dissident Voice and author of Left Out!
How Liberals Helped Reelect George W. Bush (Common Courage Press,
2005), and along with Jeffrey St. Clair, the editor of the brand new
book Red State Rebels: Tales of Grassroots Resistance in the
Heartland, published by AK Press in July 2008.
--
Nicholas Roberts
[im] skype:niccolor



  • [permaculture] Foes of Mountaintop Removal Have No Ally in the White House, Nicholas Roberts, 02/15/2009

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