NY Times Book Review of "Big Coal"

[johnkarls]

'Big Coal,' by Jeff Goodell

Black Cloud
By COREY S. POWELL
Published: June 25, 2006 in the Sunday NY Times Book Review Section

There is perhaps no greater act of denial in modern life than sticking a plug into an electric outlet. No thinking person can eat a hamburger without knowing it was once a cow, or drink water from the tap without recognizing, at least dimly, that its journey began in some distant reservoir. Electricity is different. Fully sanitized of any hint of its origins, it pours out of the socket almost like magic.

In his new book, Jeff Goodell breaks the spell with a single number: 20. That's how many pounds of coal each person in the United States consumes, on average, every day to keep the electricity flowing. Despite its outdated image, coal generates half of our electricity, far more than any other source. Demand keeps rising, thanks in part to our appetite for new electronic gadgets and appliances; with nuclear power on hold and natural gas supplies tightening, coal's importance is only going to increase. As Goodell puts it, "our shiny white iPod economy is propped up by dirty black rocks."

Coal has become near-synonymous with electricity because it is cheap and abundant. A pile of coal containing one million B.T.U.'s worth of energy costs $1.70. The equivalent amount of natural gas runs about $9. All electricity looks the same, so why pay more? Even by Goodell's explicitly conservative estimates, America has enough coal to keep its power plants humming for decades to come. And compared with prospecting for oil, finding the black rock is a snap. In Wyoming's Powder River basin the coal seams run 50 to 100 feet thick and lie so close to the surface they can be scoured in open-pit mines.

Unfortunately, coal is also dirty and dangerous. One of the highlights of "Big Coal" is Goodell's outraged account of the catastrophic 2002 flooding of a mine in Quecreek, Pa., run by PBS Coals. His story follows Randy Fogle and Blaine Mayhugh, two of nine workers who survived. Mayhugh, shattered by the experience, left to become a maintenance engineer at a wind farm. Fogle, who came from a long line of miners, returned to the work that had already taken the lives of his grandfather and his wife's grandfather. PBS Coals eventually paid a $14,100 fine for negligence that may have triggered the accident while receiving more than $500,000 from the state for costs associated with the rescue operation.

In the world of coal, that counts as a happy ending. About a month ago, an underground explosion killed five workers in Kentucky's Darby Mine No. 1. Coming on the heels of the widely publicized deaths of 12 workers in another coal mine explosion in Sago, W.Va., on Jan. 2, the latest mishap has everyone from Ted Kennedy to Gov. Ernie Fletcher of Kentucky crying out for better mine safety. There's a long way to go. More than 104,000 Americans died digging out coal between 1900 and 2005; twice as many may have died from black lung. The fatality rate in coal mining is almost 60 percent higher than it is in oil and gas extraction.

For all that, mining coal probably takes a lot fewer lives than burning it. Although coal-fired power plants generally keep getting cleaner, they contribute about three-fifths of all sulfur dioxide, one-third of all mercury, and one-fifth of all nitrogen oxide emissions in the United States. Air pollution's precise health effects are notoriously hard to quantify, but its links to heart attacks, lung disease and cancer are well established. "Big Coal" includes a chilling quotation from Joel Schwartz, a public health researcher who produced some of the first detailed studies of the toxic effects of air pollution: "I see more people dying of particle air pollution than are dying of AIDS, and I need to call people's attention to that."

Goodell's journey inevitably leads to the most dramatic and contentious consequence of coal consumption, global warming. Coal accounts for nearly 40 percent of America's carbon dioxide emissions; it provides more than two-thirds of the energy for China, the world's fastest-opening CO2 spigot. Most climate scientists agree that global temperatures are likely to increase between 2 degrees and 10 degrees Fahrenheit over the coming century. Such warming could trigger a sea-level rise of two to seven feet, coastal flooding, extreme weather and regional drought. Just protecting the United States coast against rising waters would cost hundreds of billions of dollars.

So what is to be done? Goodell's writing, so fiery and committed through the narrative parts of "Big Coal," turns oddly tentative when it comes time to endorse solutions. He waves off green dreams like wind and solar electricity. He pins much of his hopes on a kind of national psychotherapy program to "change our thinking" and "make the invisible visible," which translates into a vague endorsement of new emissions taxes and regulations.

Goodell does identify two specific, promising solutions: carbon trading and carbon sequestration. Carbon trading defines the cost of pumping carbon dioxide into the air and lets the market choose the best way to reduce emissions. Sequestration is an experimental technique for snatching carbon dioxide out of the power plant and pumping it into the ground — a technique that dovetails with a highly efficient new way of burning coal, known as the integrated gassification combined cycle.

These are plausible near-term strategies, but Goodell ignores other technologies that could radically rewrite the rules of the energy game. Coal can be used to synthesize hydrogen, for instance. That in itself isn't much of a solution — the process still emits carbon dioxide — but once the infrastructure is in place it would become much easier to use solar and wind power (or nuclear, for that matter) to make zero-carbon hydrogen.

Looking farther ahead, fusion might provide the kind of clean, abundant power that could finally wean us off finite fossil fuels. Last month the European Union, Russia, Japan, China, India, South Korea and the United States signed an agreement to build an experimental thermonuclear reactor in southern France starting in 2007. Even if it succeeds, the $5.9 billion reactor will be just a proof of concept, with commercial fusion power still decades away. But if we don't reach for such lofty goals, we may eventually find ourselves moving past denial into the next stage: depression.