Coal and the Campaign Trail

by Mark Hertsgaard

Can we live without coal? We may have to. Burning coal produces most of the world’s electricity — and most of our greenhouse gas emissions. Congress was warned this summer by James Hansen, America’s leading climate scientist and director of NASA’s Goddard Space Institute, that traditional coal-fired power plants will make our planet unlivable this century.

So where will the electricity of tomorrow come from? Don’t expect this fall’s presidential campaign to shed much light on the subject.

Neither Democrat Barack Obama nor Republican John McCain will risk alienating voters in Appalachia and other coal regions by talking about putting limits on coal. In fact, both candidates favor continued if not expanded reliance on coal. 

Or rather on “clean coal,” a phrase concocted by coal industry public relations specialists to make the dirtiest of all fossil fuels sound publicly pleasing. 

Environmentalists and public health experts say “clean coal” is a deceitful contradiction in terms. As journalist Jeff Goodell documents in his book Big Coal, the mining, processing and burning of coal throughout history has claimed millions of lives and ravaged global ecosystems. None of the technological fixes now under discussion will much change that fact. 

Nevertheless, McCain says coal “must play a major role in [securing America’s] energy independence” and promises, if elected, to spend $2 billion a year developing “clean coal technology.” Obama, who hails from the coal state of Illinois, says that as president he would help the private sector build five commercial-scale coal power plants able to capture and store their carbon dioxide emissions, the most important greenhouse gas.

Of course, that’s only if such plants can indeed be built -- a big if, since none currently exist.

What the candidates aren’t saying is that burning coal -- just as we’ve done in the past --will likely bring climate chaos, according to Hansen. The NASA scientist first put the climate problem on the international agenda when he testified to the U.S. Senate in 1988, declaring that man-made global warming had begun.

In April 2008, Hansen co-authored a study finding that carbon emissions must be cut far more sharply than anyone previously assumed if humanity is to avoid what scientists call “the worst scenarios of climate change” — including an eventual sea level rise of eighty feet, putting most of civilization under water. The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is now 385 parts per million and climbing by 2 ppm a year. Hansen’s study concluded that 350 ppm is the maximum level compatible with a livable planet. In short, humanity is already operating in the danger zone and must reverse course rapidly.

“We need a moratorium on the construction of traditional coal-fired power plants by 2010 and a phase-out by 2030,” Hansen says. This farewell to coal “has to be global,” he adds, and must include China and India, each of which insists that burning coal is essential to lifting millions of their people out of poverty.

Eliminating coal burning won’t be easy, but neither is it impossible. Just a year ago, 150 new coal power plants were planned for the U.S. Already 60 have been cancelled and another fifty are being contested -- a reflection of state governments’ and private capital markets’ growing understanding of the economic and health risks of coal-fired electricity.

Improving energy efficiency — doing more work with less fuel — is the quickest, safest and most lucrative path to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Some of the world’s biggest corporations already know this and are cashing in big time. The energy giant BP has invested $20 million to increase its energy efficiency, saving $650 million in lower fuel costs — an astonishing thirty-two fold return on investment. 

Improving energy efficiency can buy us time to complete the shift from coal to zero or low carbon alternatives. The best bets currently are solar, wind and geothermal. Wind is the fastest growing electricity source in the world. A recent Scientific American article suggests that solar thermal power could supply all U.S. electricity. (Nuclear remains a poor energy option due to its astronomical construction costs, safety and weapons risks.)

A self-described political conservative, NASA’s Hansen blames “special interests” for blocking green energy solutions. “There’s no reason we can’t make the changes necessary except that the fossil fuel industries are determining governments’ policies,” he says.

Both Obama and McCain claim to want real change in Washington. But so far neither seems prepared to break with the fossil fuel industries that have dominated and distorted American energy policy for decades.

If the United States is to phase out coal, politicians must be pressured from below -- by ordinary, organized citizens who care more about their children’s futures than about political rhetoric and industry scare tactics. This fall’s presidential campaign is an excellent place to begin.

Mark Hertsgaard (www.markhertsgaard.com) is an independent journalist and author whose forthcoming book is titled, Living Through the Storm: How We Survive the Next 50 Years of Global Warming.

© Blue Ridge Press 2008