The History of Environmentalism: The War on Coal, Part IV

This is the latest contribution from Mr. William Kay.  His essay is long, well documented, a bit complicated and covers more tie-in subjects than you normally see, so I asked him if I could post the entire essay in installments.  He has agreed.  I wish to post his essay in this way because I believe it will give everyone more time to dwell on the subject.  The story of coal is deep….and not because it is under the ground.  You will find this more than interesting, but remember…..”There is no such thing as a conspiracy!”  Rich Kozlovich

The War on Coal

Six Supplemental Observations

The USA, Australia, and Canada possess half the world’s uranium and half the world’s coal. That we are monkeying around with wind and solar power is a travesty. The spectre haunting Europe is a North America dotted with an archipelago of 4,000 MW coal plants perched on the edges of vast coal fields and pumping out juice too cheap to meter. China, India, Turkey, and Vietnam are in the midst of a coal power boom because they understand the meaning of “neo-imperialist under-development” whereas for Yanks, Aussies, and Canucks such words are, not accidentally, taboo.

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Climate Change and its joint venture, the War on Coal, dwell at the confluence of two grand social forces: environmentalism and the electricity industry. The international environmental movement is pressing for a wide-ranging social transformation of which energy policy is but one aspect. Electricity is but one aspect of energy.

Six electricity generating methods (coal, nuclear, natural gas, hydro, wind, and solar) account for 99% the current sold in the world’s multi-trillion dollar electricity market. Underlying each method lies a distinct industrial complex of resource extraction companies, equipment manufacturers, specialized engineering, banking, and shipping interests. These industrial complexes compete for market share. This competition exists independently of the environmental movement but is warped by the environmentalists’ preference for renewables.

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Wind power is an historic boondoggle. EU countries spent $250 billion assembling and hooking-up 60,000 wind turbines with an advertised capacity of around 75,000 MW but an actual average output closer to 12,000 MW. South Africa and India are both currently building 4,000 MW coal-fired power plants for $4 billion each. Coal plants operate at 90% of capacity. The EU could have spent its wind budget on a coal-powered system capable of reliably delivering 225,000 MW - eighteen times what they are getting from their erratic wind farms!

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Is the “shale gas revolution” the new Climate Change?

The natural gas industry has been a driving force inside the Climate Change campaign for almost 20 years. Gas industry lobbyists told lies about the atmosphere to denigrate coal and to win the government approvals and preferences they needed to build gas-fired power plants, gas storage facilities, pipelines, etc. Gas industry lobbyists now use controversial estimates of immense domestic shale gas deposits to advance national energy security arguments to win the preferences and permits they need to continue building the gas infrastructure. Advances in horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing have produced much gas, but coterminous with the shale gas revolution has been a bigger liquid natural gas (LNG) revolution. In the future will gas-electric plants be supplied with costly, contentious domestic shale gas or with cheap, care-free LNG from Qatar?

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Environmentalism must be placed in the context of the metropolitan-hinterland and land-capital dichotomies. The West’s dominant metropole is the EU’s core area. Ancillary metropoles are found in the US Northeast and in various narrow corridors: San Diego-Sacramento, Toronto-Montreal, Sydney-Melbourne, etc. Land in and around these metropoles is notoriously expensive. Preserving this value bubble means preventing migration into the hinterlands. This translates into creating evermore parkland and into policies lessening the metropoles’ dependence on hinterland resources such as recycling, locavorism, and renewable energy. Ask not what a policy can do for the public; ask what a policy can do for metropolitan landowners.

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Finally a word about coal ecology:

Coal is a sedimentary rock comprised of fossilized plant remains. Usually dead plant matter is consumed by fire or microbial decomposition.  However, in areas adjacent to stagnant waters plant matter often does not burn and is partially decomposed into mulch (peat). In slowly subsiding wetlands, peat builds up and is then buried. Millions of years of intense weight and heat pressure-cook peat into coal. No alchemy is at work here. No new elements are created or added. Coals, from the mushy brown lignites to the glassy black anthracites, are at the molecular level basically garden salads. The carbon, sulphur, and trace metals compounds emitted by coal furnaces are the same molecules emitted into the environment by the burning or decomposing of plants. Coal burning presents no more of an environmental hazard than does the drying up and blowing away of the golden leaves of autumn.

Sources

This essay appears in its entirety at William Kay's site,

Environmentalism is Fascism