Big Coal: The Dirty Secret Behind America's Energy Future - Hardcover

Goodell, Jeff

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0618319409 ISBN 13: 9780618319404

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2006

Synopsis

In the tradition of Rachel Carson and Eric Schlosser, the veteran journalist Jeff Goodell examines the danger behind President George W. Bush's recent assertion that coal is America's "economic destiny."

Despite a devastating, century-long legacy that has claimed millions of lives and ravaged the environment, coal has become hot again -- and will likely get hotter. In this penetrating analysis, Goodell debunks the faulty assumptions underlying coal's revival and shatters the myth of cheap coal energy. In a compelling blend of hard-hitting investigative reporting, history, and industry assessment, Goodell illuminates the stark economic imperatives America faces and the collusion of business and politics -- what is meant by "big coal" -- that have set us on the dangerous course toward reliance on this energy source.

Few of us realize that even today we burn a lump of coal every time we flip on a switch. Coal already supplies more than half the energy needed to power our iPods, laptops, lights -- anything we use that consumes electricity. Our desire to find a homegrown alternative to Mideast oil, the rising cost of oil and natural gas, and the fossil fuel-friendly mood in Washington will soon push our coal consumption through the roof. Because we have failed to develop alternative energy sources, coal has effectively become the default fuel for the twenty-first century.

About this title

About the Author

JEFF GOODELL is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone and a frequent contributor to the New York Times Magazine. He is the author of the New York Times bestseller Our Story: 77 Hours That Tested Our Friendship and Our Faith, based on the terrifying hours nine Quecreek miners spent trapped underground; he appeared on Oprah to talk with the miners about their experience. Goodell’s first book, The Cyberthief and the Samurai, was about the hunt for the notorious computer hacker Kevin Mitnick. His memoir, Sunnyvale: The Rise and Fall of a Silicon Valley Family, was a New York Times Notable Book.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Introduction

One of the triumphs of modern life is our ability to distance ourselves from the
simple facts of our own existence. We love our hamburgers, but we've never
seen the inside of a slaughterhouse. We're not sure if the asparagus that
accompanies our salmon is grown in Ecuador or Oregon. We flush the toilet
and don't want to know any more. If we feel bad, we take a pill. We don't
even bury our own dead—they are carted away and buried or burned for us.
It's easy to forget what a luxury this is—until you visit a place like
China. Despite its booming economy in recent years, the insulating walls of
modern life have not yet been fully erected there. In restaurants, the entrées
are often alive in a cage in the dining room. Herbs and acupuncture needles
inspire more faith than pharmaceutical drugs. Toilets stink. In rural areas,
running water is a surprise, hot water a thrill. When you flip the switch on the
wall and the light goes on, you know exactly what it costs—all you have to
do is take a deep breath and feel the burn of coal smoke in your lungs.
To a westerner, nothing is more uncivilized than the sulfury smell
of coal. You can't take a whiff without thinking of labor battles and
underground mine explosions, of chugging smokestacks and black lung.
But coal is everywhere in twenty-first-century China. It's piled up
on sidewalks, pressed into bricks and stacked near the back doors of
homes, stockpiled into small mountains in the middle of open fields, and
carted around behind bicycles and old wheezing locomotives. Plumes of coal
smoke rise from rusty stacks on every urban horizon. There is soot on every
windowsill and around the collar of every white shirt. Coal is what's fueling
China's economic boom, and nobody makes any pretense that it isn't. And
as it did in America one hundred years ago, the power of coal will lift China
into a better world. It will make the country richer, more civilized, and more
remote from the hard facts of life, just like us.
The cost of the rough journey China is undertaking is obvious.
More than six thousand workers a year are killed in China's coal mines. The
World Health Organization estimates that in East Asia, a region made up
predominantly of China and South Korea, 355,000 people a year die from the
effects of urban outdoor air pollution. The first time I visited Jiamusi, a city in
China's industrial north, it was so befouled by coal smoke that I could hardly
see across the street. All over China, limestone buildings are dissolving in
the acidic air. In Beijing, the ancient outdoor statuary at a 700-year-old Taoist
temple I visited was encased in Plexiglas to protect it. And it's not just the
Chinese who are paying for their coal-fired prosperity. Pollution from China's
power plants blows across the Pacific and is inhaled by sunbathers on
Malibu beach. Toxic mercury from Chinese coal finds its way into polar bears
in the Arctic. Most seriously, the carbon dioxide released by China's mad
burning of coal is helping to destabilize the climate of the entire planet.
All this would be much easier to condemn if the West had not
done exactly the same thing during its headlong rush to become rich and
prosperous. In fact, we're still doing it. Although America is a vastly richer
country with many more options available to us, our per capita consumption
of coal is three times higher than China's. You can argue that we manage it
better—our mines are safer, our power plants are cleaner—but mostly we
just hide it better. We hide it so well, in fact, that many Americans think that
coal went out with corsets and top hats. Most of us have no idea how central
coal is to our everyday lives or what our relationship with this black rock
really costs us.
In truth, the United States is more dependent on coal today than
ever before. The average American consumes about twenty pounds of it a
day. We don't use it to warm our hearths anymore, but we burn it by wire
whenever we flip on the light switch or charge up our laptops. More than one
hundred years after Thomas Edison connected the first light bulb to a coal-
fired generator, coal remains the bedrock of the electric power industry in
America. About half the electricity we consume comes from coal—we burn
more than a billion tons of it a year, usually in big, aging power plants that
churn out amazing quantities of power, profit, and pollution. In fact, electric
power generation is one of the largest and most capital-intensive industries in
the country, with revenues of more than $260 billion in 2004. And the rise of
the Internet—a global network of electrons—has only increased the
industry's power and influence. We may not like to admit it, but our shiny
white iPod economy is propped up by dirty black rocks.
This was not how things were supposed to go in America. Coal
was supposed to be the engine of the industrial revolution, not the Internet
revolution. It once powered our steamships and trains; it forged the steel that
won the wars and shaped our cars and skyscrapers and airplanes. It kept
pioneers warm on the prairie and built fortunes for robber barons such as
Henry Frick and Andrew Carnegie. Without coal, the world as we know it
today would be impossible to imagine. There should be monuments to coal in
every big city, giant statues of Pennsylvania anthracite and West Virginia
bituminous. It is literally the rock that built America.
But we've been hooked on coal for almost 150 years now, and like
a Bowery junkie, we keep telling ourselves it's time to come clean, without
ever actually doing it. We stopped burning coal in our homes in the 1930s, in
locomotives in the 1940s, and by the 1950s it seemed that coal was on its
way out for electricity generation, too. Nuclear power was the great dream of
the post–World War II era, but the near-meltdown of the Three Mile Island
nuclear plant in 1979 put an end to that. Then natural gas overtook coal as
the fuel of choice. If coal was our industrial smack, natural gas was our
methadone: it was clean, easy to transport, and nearly as cheap as coal.
Virtually every power plant built in America between 1975 and 2002 was gas-
fired. Almost everybody in the energy world presumed that the natural gas
era would soon give way to even cleaner sources of power generation—wind,
solar, biofuels, hydrogen, perhaps someday solar panels on the moon. As for
the old coal plants, they would be dismantled, repowered, or left to rust in the
fields.
But like many revolutions, this one hasn't progressed quite as
planned.

Energy-wise, the fundamental problem in the world today is that the earth's
reserves of fossil fuels are finite but our appetite for them is not. The issue is
not simply that there are more people in the world, consuming more fossil
fuels, but that as economies grow and people in developing nations are lifted
out of poverty, they buy cars and refrigerators and develop an appetite for
gas, oil, and coal. Between 1950 and 2000, as the world population grew by
roughly 140 percent, fossil fuel consumption increased by almost 400
percent. By 2030, the world's demand for energy is projected to more than
double, with most of that energy coming from fossil fuels.
Of course, every barrel of oil we pump out of the ground, every
cubic foot of natural gas we consume, and every ton of coal we burn further
depletes reserves. For a while, our day of reckoning was put off by the fact
that technological innovation outpaced consumption: the more fossil fuels we
burned, the better we became at finding more, lulling us into a false belief
that the world's reserves of fossil fuels are eternal. But that delusion can't
last forever. In fact, there are increasing signs that it won't last much longer.
Oil is the most critical fossil fuel for modern economies,
underlying everything from transportation to manufacturing. In 2004, the world
consumed about 80 million barrels of oil each day, about 30 percent of which
came from the Middle East. The world is not going to run out of oil anytime
soon, but it might run out of cheap, easy-to-get oil. As that happens, prices
are likely to spike, fundamentally disrupting major parts of the world's
economy. You don't have to buy into the apocalyptic scenarios that some
doomsayers predict — the collapse of industrial society, widespread
famine — to see that the end of cheap oil is going to inspire panic and
economic chaos as the world scrambles to find a replacement energy source.
The situation with natural gas is not much better. In the United
States, consumption of natural gas, which is mostly used for home heating
and the manufacture of industrial products, as well as agricultural fertilizers
and chemicals, has jumped by about 40 percent in the past two decades.
About 85 percent of that gas came from domestic sources, but production in
the United States has been flat for several decades, leading us to import
more and more from Canada, where production is also beginning to peak.
There are still substantial reserves in places such as Russia and Qatar, but
the global shipping and trading infrastructure is woefully undeveloped.
Upgrading it will cost billions of dollars and take decades to complete. Not
surprisingly, natural gas prices have tripled in the past few years and caused
home heating bills to rise rapidly in many regions of the country.
What about the other alternatives? Nuclear power can be used to
generate electricity, but no new plants have been built in America in thirty
years. This is primarily beca...

About this edition

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0618319409
• ISBN 13: 9780618319404
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 324