Chrisy58′s Weblog

The G-20 summit is coming to Pittsburgh this week because, in President Barack Obama’s words, the city stands as a “bold example” of how to succeed in “transitioning to a 21st-century economy.” So it’s a sad irony that the International Pittsburgh Coal Conference is being held at the same time.

While world leaders will gather at the G-20 summit to consider the way forward for the global economy, the coal conference, in its misguided promotion of coal as a clean and sustainable energy source, is pointing America and the world in the opposite direction.

The simple truth is that, from cradle to grave, coal is inherently filthy; the environmentally responsible use of coal is impossible. The coal industry is attempting to put a pretty face on coal through glossy multi-million-dollar advertising campaigns promoting the lie that coal is not only clean and green, it’s also red, white and blue. But coal is neither responsible nor patriotic.

Coal industry lobbyists are quietly working the halls of Congress, outwardly promoting the coal industry’s attempts to “clean up” while trying to ensure that any climate-change legislation protects their dirty ways. And they’re doing this at a time when the United States urgently needs to address global climate change and the critical role played by our continued addiction to coal.

Southwestern Pennsylvania is home to four of the 50 dirtiest coal plants in the United States, including the Bruce Mansfield plant, 25 miles upwind from Downtown Pittsburgh. But coal’s damage to the region is far greater than the pollution from these coal plants.

Longwall mining in southwestern Pennsylvania literally undermines homes, transportation networks and waterways, destroying streams, structures and water supplies and creating an enormous tax burden on Pennsylvania citizens. Strip mining destroys ecologically valuable headwater streams and causes blasting damage to homes and structures. It also contaminates drinking-water supplies, often with heavy metals. Abandoned mine drainage continues to foul more than 4,000 miles of Pennsylvania streams, rendering many biologically dead.

Then there’s the growing crisis of coal-ash storage and disposal.

A recent failure of a coal-ash impoundment in Tennessee released 1.1 billion gallons of slurry into an adjoining community and into the Emory and Clinch rivers. Contamination from an impoundment near Pittsburgh called “Little Blue” has been detected at groundwater monitoring wells in the area. Little Blue is 30 times larger than the Tennessee impoundment, and a potential breach could threaten the health and lives of 50,000 people. The National Inventory of Dams gives this facility a “high hazard” rating.

Even if we could reduce toxic emissions from coal-fired power plants — and that’s a big if — coal mining and waste disposal are unavoidably destructive to the environment. Though the International Pittsburgh Coal Conference is touting industry efforts to clean up coal-fired power, there is no clean way to extract coal or dispose of coal waste.

And while coal is filthy from an environmental standpoint, the industry also plays very dirty politics, lobbying hard to prevent Congress from passing a true clean-energy jobs plan. This was made evident this past July when it was discovered that letters forged by lobbyists to misrepresent community organizations’ positions on the American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES) were sent to several members of Congress, including Pennsylvania Reps. Kathy Dahlkemper and Chris Carney.

Dirty politics aside, the U.S. House of Representatives’ recent passage of the ACES was a step in the right direction. But it does contain one major loophole that stands in the way of an economy truly based on clean energy.

ACES, as currently written, does not adequately address carbon-dioxide emissions spewing from hundreds of existing coal plants across the country — plants that contribute over 30 percent of our nation’s climate-changing greenhouse gases. Allowing existing plants to escape regulation encourages the expansion of these dirty plants, effectively increasing emissions and undercutting the purpose of the clean-energy act.

The Senate can take several measures to strengthen clean-energy legislation.

First, the dirtiest sources of pollution should be cleaned up. According to the House bill, only plants permitted after Jan. 1, 2009 would be subject to performance standards — giving older, dirtier plants a license for lifetime pollution.

Second, energy-efficiency and renewable-energy standards should be improved, eliminating loopholes in the House legislation, to encourage the creation of additional clean energy jobs.

Third, more money should be invested in clean-energy opportunities that would help protect us against the impacts of global climate change.

These measures would help our nation begin the transition away from coal toward cleaner forms of energy generation and would lessen the burden on citizens in vulnerable Pennsylvania coalfield communities.

Instead of creating additional loopholes that allow for continued coal pollution, the Senate should ensure that any climate-change or clean-energy legislation does more to build a true clean-energy economy — and frees our country from the coal industry’s dirty business-as-usual tactics.