Category Archives: Coal mining

The world’s ferocious demand for coal

This is very worrisome:

The IEA estimates that China, which generates more than 70% of its electricity with coal, will build 600 gigawatts (GW) of coal-fired power capacity in the next quarter-century—as much as is currently generated with coal in America, Japan and the European Union put together. Nomura, a Japanese bank, thinks that may be an underestimate. It reckons China will add some 500GW of coal-fired power by as early as 2015, and will more than double its current generating capacity by 2020. It expects Indian coal-fired power generation to grow too—though more slowly.

Even developing countries with vast quantities of coal under home soil will find themselves unable to dig it out quickly enough to meet demand. China, the world’s biggest coal producer by some distance, has turned to foreign suppliers over the past couple of years and is likely to rely on them even more in future. Its voracious appetite for energy and steel means it will need at least 5-7% more coal each year. Citigroup reckons China will import 233m tonnes in 2011. As Daniel Brebner of Deutsche Bank points out, that is considerably more than the annual capacity of Richards Bay in South Africa or Newcastle in Australia, the world’s biggest coal ports.

If there is to be any hope that rapidly developing states like India and China will switch to a low-carbon development path, it seems essential that rich states like Canada and the United States lead the way – demonstrating that de-carbonization can be achieved at an acceptable cost.

Unfortunately, that seems to be the last thing on the minds of our politicians at the moment. Indeed, developed states remain happy to export coal to places like China, then import some of the products it helps to produce:

As environmentalists point out, rich countries that spurn coal-fired power while exporting the rocks to countries with less ambitious emissions targets are merely shifting the problem around the globe.

For the world as a whole to succeed in reducing greenhouse gas pollution, there are going to need to be restrictions on digging up fossil fuels, as well as importing and exporting them.

Learning about civil disobedience

Based on my limited understanding of the tactic, civil disobedience seems well suited to certain kinds of societal problems. Specifically, it seems to hold promise in cases where the problem being addressed is society-wide, such as racism, and where there is a very strong moral claim to be made. It also seems well suited to situations where, at the beginning at least, those upholding a sound moral principle are seriously outnumbered and outgunned by those who want to keep violating that principle.

All these things make me think civil disobedience could be well suited to responding to climate change. Does that seem plausible to others? NASA climatologist James Hansen has engaged in several acts of civil disobedience, resisting mountaintop removal coal mining.

What would be the best historical examples to consider, in order to gain a better understanding of the phenomenon of principled resistance to unjust laws? Also, which books, essays, and speeches would be most useful for developing a fuller comprehension.

2009 energy production figures

Statistics Canada has just released some information on energy trends in 2009.

Production for all forms of energy was down: refined petroleum products (like gasoline), natural gas, electricity, and coal:

Coal production was down 8.7% in 2009, primarily as a result of lower demand by electric utilities, as well as in the manufacturing sector.

Consumption of coal by the manufacturing sector decreased 20.7% in 2009 from 2008, as a result of decreased demand for energy in the manufacturing sector overall.

Exports of Canadian coal fell 12.8% in 2009 following three years of increases. About half (51%) of all coal produced in Canada in 2009 was exported.

The principal cause of all of this is almost certainly ongoing economic weakness, in both Canada and the United States. If economic growth picks up sharply, energy demand will probably rise with it.

Coal and China

Cutting global coal use is the single most important thing to do, if we want to prevent the effects of climate change from becoming catastrophic. As such, the use of coal in China is a critical issue for the entire world. In 2009, China consumed 49% of the world’s coal, much of that to produce exports that went to other countries, from steel girders to iPods.

Much of the coal China uses is produced and shipped domestically (sometimes causing carbon tariffs). The fact that China’s leadership is less clueless about science than those in Canada and the U.S. may help. That said, it will take an enormous effort to decarbonize the global economy before catastrophic climate change has been locked in. Curbing coal burning in China will be one of the key battles in that overall effort.

Beyond climate change, air pollution from coal also causes enormous death and suffering in China – further reason to push aggressively toward better energy options.

The Ultimate Roller Coaster Ride: An Abbreviated History of Fossil Fuels

This video is rather quick, and might be overwhelming to those not already somewhat familiar with the history being described. Still, it does a remarkable job of relating the history of fossil fuels in five minutes:

Readers may not agree with all of the arguments – some are certainly debatable – but it seems like a good way of pressing people to think about some of the ways fossil fuels have influenced history, and about some of the interconnected issues of today.

The video was produced by the post carbon institute. The organization has written material that expands on the video: The Post Carbon Reader – Managing the 21st Century’s Sustainability Crises. They have some pretty high-profile fellows: Bill McKibben and William Rees among them.

Keepin’ Carbon Underground

For the last 10,000 years during which human civilization has emerged, the planet has had a relatively stable climate. Carbon embedded in coal, oil and gas has been a major establishing feature of the climate around the world.

Since the Industrial Revolution, humanity has been burning those fuels at ever-increasing rates – rapidly returning that carbon to the atmosphere. As a result, we’re on track to heat up the planet by more than 5°C by 2100. That is far beyond the 2°C threshold of warming that scientists and policy-makers have widely accepted as ‘dangerous‘.

The solution to human-induced climate change is to leave most of the world’s remaining fossil fuels underground. That way, the carbon they contain will be kept in a place where it doesn’t affect the climate. To accomplish that, we are going to need to find alternative sources of energy. Nuclear fission is one of the temporary bridging options. However it has its own issues: it has non-renewable fuel and waste and proliferation problems. Ultimately, though, if humanity wants to power itself in a way that can be perpetuated forever and which does not threaten the climate, we’re going to need to draw the energy we need from renewable sources: hydroelectricity, solar power, wind, tidal, geothermal, and so on.

Given how much it would transform our world – and how many human lives that would harm – we need to keep most of the carbon still locked in fossil fuels underground.

Report Back: CJM Workshop on “Landed Resistance: How Land Rights Struggles Fight Climate Change”

Today I had the privilege of attending a workshop put on by Climate Justice Montreal at McGill University on the issues of land, resistance, and climate change. The workshop facilitated active participation to draw out the participants own ideas of their own name, lineage and family history, and encouraged them to compare that history with the narrative structures “Canadian History” is given in the state school system. The power of narrative was stressed – the idea that society is not made up of matter or even institutions but primarily of stories which we tell ourselves, tell our children, and are told by those who have something to gain by our believing them. The framework of narrative power enabled the group to criticize their own ideas of their own history, and reclaim a more genuine grasp on the relationship between their personal history and the social narratives which structure the way that history is expressed in dominant social stories.

To give a specific example, the idea of the “hard working farmers who came here because they wanted to” was critiqued. The example of Irish immigration to make this case is particularly poignant: Ireland was depopulated in the 19th century through a purposeful genocide, in order to encourage immigration to North America. In other words – many Irish immigrants did not come “to seek a better life in a new land”, but because their old life had been strategically destroyed by a colonialist power. Ireland itself was a feudal state where the British had installed Ulster-Scots as the ruling people – to dominate and oppress the Irish while themselves being second-class compared to their English masters. The Irish who then arrived in Canada were largely directed towards the United States, because social darwinist theory of the time asserted that Eastern Europeans were harder workers – and Canadian colonial services preferred to install Polish and German immigrants as prairie farmers.

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Carbon pricing and regional disparity

One reason why climate change legislation is so hard to pass is because of the large discrepancies between regions, in terms of dependence on different sources of energy and – by extension – the size of effect carbon pricing would have.

A recent article on The New Yorker discusses the failure of the Obama administration to pass climate change legislation so far, and points out the awareness of those in the U.S. Senate to this regional issue:

When [Senator Lieberman] went to lobby Evan Bayh, of Indiana, Bayh held up a map of the United States showing, in varying shades of red, the percentage of electricity that each state derived from burning coal, the main source of greenhouse-gas emissions in the United States. The more coal used, the redder the state and the more it would be affected by a cap on carbon. The Northeast, the West Coast, and the upper Northwest of the country were pale. But the broad middle of the country—Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois—was crimson. (Indiana, for example, derives ninety-four per cent of its electricity from coal). “Every time Senator Lieberman would open his mouth, Bayh would show him the map,” a Lieberman aide said.

The same is probably true in many other developed democracies. In Canada, some provinces depend on fossil fuels for a substantial portion of their electricity generation, while others do not. Similarly, some have a lot of jobs and revenues that depend on the oil and gas industry, while others do not.

The fact that some places have been emitting harmful emissions in the past does not give them a right to continue doing so, now that we know about the harms and risks that such burning imposes on other people. That said, when it comes to developing policies and regulations that can actually get through the political system, awareness of regional disparities needs to be maintained and deals will ultimately need to be struck. While the fairest thing would be for oil, gas, and coal producing places to say: “We profited from the fuels in the past because we were ignorant about the harms they cause. Now we know better, so we will stop voluntarily” it is deeply unrealistic to expect them to do so. Rather, they will need to be bought off to some extent, and constrained by the force of the moral argument to some additional extent.

Export ethics: asbestos and coal

Controversially, Canada is a major producer and exporter of asbestos – a material that has been judged too dangerous for domestic use, but which the government and Canadian firms apparently feels to be good enough for developing countries. At the same time as the Government of Canada was paying to promote asbestos sales abroad, workers in hazmat suits were carefully removing the material from our Parliament buildings. Driven largely by concerns about a small number of jobs in Quebec, Canada remains an asbestos booster, still willing to fund the Chrysotile Institute.

This raises a question that is profoundly related to the problem of coal: what is the ethical position of states with large reserves of a dangerous resource, for which there is a market overseas?

Equal treatment

Naturally, there are several different approaches that can be taken in evaluating this ethical question. One is to focus on some notion of equal treatment. If we think asbestos is too dangerous for Canadians, why is it OK to sell to Indians. Does it matter that they are buying it voluntarily? In a related question, does it matter that they have less ability to afford safer alternatives? One can certainly argue that Canada should not be willing to expose the citizens of other countries to dangers we would consider unacceptable here. In a counter-argument, it is possible to argue that depriving the recipient countries of asbestos would make them even worse off than they are now, by forcing the use of something even worse.

Cost-benefit considerations

Another approach is more economically inspired. One way of phrasing it would be: “Is absolutely everybody better off, in a situation where Canada chooses to export asbestos?” When allowing something to occur, such as a trade, improves the welfare of at least some people involved without harming that of anybody, economists say that the trade is a Pareto improvement. This is often a high bar, and certainly isn’t met in the asbestos case. At least some people in the recipient countries will get sick and die as a consequence of this international trade in asbestos.

A less rigorous standard is called ‘potential Pareto optimality’ or Kaldor–Hicks efficiency. In this approach, you tally up all the costs and benefits associated with a decision. If the sum of the benefits is large enough that the winners could theoretically compensate the losers, then there is a certain sense in which making that choice could be justified.

There are a number of serious problems with Kaldor–Hicks, however. Firstly, there is no requirement that compensation actually be paid. That means that some people will suffer for the enrichment of others, and without giving consent to the arrangement. Secondly, there is the ever-tricky question of deciding what human health and lives are worth. In most economic analyses, the value of an Indian life is implicitly rated lower than that of a Canadian life, because governments and individuals are able to spend more to defend the latter than the former.

What about coal?

Some states – like China and the United States – both produce and use a massive amount of coal. Some, like Canada and Australia, are exporters on an enormous scale. The coal dug up in Canada, sold overseas, and burned causes harm to an enormous number of people. Some, like the Canadian coal miners, take on the risks in a relatively voluntary way. Others, like the members of future generations threatened by climate change, are completely vulnerable to the choices we make on their behalf. Other groups that are harmed include those who suffer from the air and water pollution that accompanies coal burning.

Eventually, I think it will be generally recognized that digging up coal for export is not ethical. It allows those who are alive today to enrich themselves, while forcing the associated risks onto innocent members of future generations. The path to a coal-free world will be a very difficult one, not least because of the massive investments that rely on the continued burning of the stuff. Achieving that outcome will require voluntary restraint, restrictions on coal burning imposed on companies and individuals by the state, and quite possibly the conscientious refusal of some states to sell the climate-wrecking stuff, even when there are still ready buyers internationally.

Coal-blocked roads in China

Illegally mined coal is being blamed for a massive traffic jam in China. The jam has already lasted for 11 days, and is expected to last for two more weeks:

For years, small illegal coal mines in the province of Shanxi provided Beijing and its surroundings with a good deal of coal but so many of the mines would collapse or explode, and so many miners would die, (over 1,600 nationwide last year according to official figures) that the local authorities have closed most of them down.

That’s all very well, but China being China, the province of Inner Mongolia, to the North of Shanxi, has taken up the slack. And an awful lot of the trucks currently snarled on the G110 expressway to Beijing are carrying coal mined illegally in Inner Mongolia.

They are taking the G110, drivers explained to the daily Beijing News, because there are no coal checkpoints on that highway, so they don’t have to bribe any inspectors to turn a blind eye to their illegal loads.

The situation demonstrates the intersection between a number of relevant phenomena: infrastructure (including transport and energy), governance (including the enforcement of law and regulations), and the influence of the state.

Apparently, the usual cost to ship a 30 ton truck of coal from Inner Mongolia to Beijing is $1,765.