Category Archives: Air pollution

Posts relating to air pollution

“Just Energy” – the alternative to legislative solutions?

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EDIT: Since writing this post, it has come to my attention that “Just Energy” is just a scam. The Better Business Bureau has rated them an F on a scale of A+ to F. I’m going to leave the post up, however, since their being-a-scam I think actually strengthens my central claim which is in opposition to firms (or scams) such as these.

It has been said by other contributors to BuryCoal.com that increased nationalization of the power grid is not politically possible in our current political climate.  So, maybe we should support private market solutions? What this might mean was made real for me when two representatives for “Just Energy” stopped by my house this weekend. “Just Energy” is a firm which sells electricity through the Ontario power grid to consumers who choose to pick it as their energy supplier. Consumers in Ontario, apparently, have various different options for purchasing power – they can pick the normal option (Ontario power), and pay the regulated rate. Or, they can go with an alternative supplier. Alternative suppliers might save them money in the short term when market rates are low, or in the case of Just Energy, people might be willing to pay more to know that their energy is coming from only “Green” sources.

So how does it work? You pay the market rate plus 3 cents per kilowatt hour, and in exchange all of your power is produced by hydro and wind. I asked the representatives if they were looking for more customers because currently they were under-producing, i.e. not putting as much power onto the grid than their dams or wind farms enabled. It quickly became apparent that this would be insane – so it seems that what happens is that if they are already supplying clean energy to all their “customers”, i.e. those who check “Just Energy” on their bill, they can sell power to the grid at the market rate. So, it’s quite understandable why they would want young minions running from house to house convincing you to pay them market rate plus 3 cents, since their opportunity cost is to sell it to the general grid at market rate.

Now, what is the logic here, from a consumer ethics point of view? It is true that supplying more capital to Just Energy will allow them to build more green power generation. Although, only if they believe that extra capital is warranted by the market demand for over priced (with respect to the market at least) “green” energy. What seems far more likely is that up to the point where they can supply all their energy to consumers willing to pay the extra fee, they will simply pocket the extra 3 cents per kw/h.

To my mind, paying above the market price for energy misses the point of being an activist for climate change entirely. Green energy is only “over priced” because the market rate does not represent the real cost of carbon heavy energy. The real cost is the extent to which man made climate change will make the future world a less bountiful one than the one we live in – we are effectively stealing from the future. Everyone, even Ron Paul, agrees that stealing is wrong, and that preventing crimes like theft is a legitimate role for government. What is disagreed upon, not just by the extreme libertarian right, but by the mainstream elite today, is that stealing from the future constitutes stealing. In Larry King’s words, “No one cares about 50 years from now.”

Coal and Railroading in North America since 1960

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The dieselization of North American railroading was nearing completion by 1960. The previously dominant steam engines had been removed largely not due to concern over the cost of fuel, but rather maintenance and crew costs. Steam engines were very expensive to maintain – they spent almost twice as much time in a shop than they spent pulling trains. They were also expensive to crew – for instance, a freight train pulled by two steam engines requires two complete 3 or 4 man crews, whereas a freight train pulled by a dozen diesels can be run by two men. Also, whereas a diesel can be started almost like an automobile and be ready to run in minutes, a steam engine takes hours to heat the fire and build up enough steam to move a train.

Because the move to diesel power was not motivated primarily by energy costs, the changing price gap between oil and coal did not result in railways switching back and forth between coal powered steam and oil powered diesel. If a firm had wanted to put steamers back in service, this would have been possible only through not only restoration of the locomotives, but also reconstruction of the watering infrastructure, and hiring, training and paying the large number of people required to crew the engines.

When extreme price disparity between oil and coal arose during the late 70’s oil crisis, it motivated American Coal Enterprises (ACE) to design a “modern” steam engine (which I’ve written about before on my blog). To show they were serious about coal as a still current railroading fuel, Ross Rowland (their head) acquired the use of a steam locomotive and ran it in freight service pulling coal trains – and demonstrated that even using 1950’s technology the fuel costs were lower using coal. As for crew costs, the ACE 3000 was modern – computer controlled etc, needing no more crew than a diesel. The problem of water was solved with a steam condensing system, which meant new water was required only every 1000 miles. It was also designed to require far less maintenance than steam engines of old. However, there were no orders, and the engine was never built. I think this is significant – why would no firms want to be isolated from the fluctuating price of oil? Are firms simply inherently conservative?

The problem with the conservative thesis is that there are other examples of railroads taking risks on new technologies to exploit cheap fuel – for instance Union Pacific’s GTEL (Gas Turbine Electric) locomotives of the 50’s and 60’s presented a tempting alternative to dieselization.

Unlike diesels, they were powerful (4000-8000hp), and also unlike diesels they ran on very inexpensive “Bunker C” fuel (which is nasty stuff). They were procured to replace the Big Boy steam locomotives, to pull heavy freights over the most challenging sections of UP mainline (romanticized here). There was even coal-powered variant which ran on ground up coal dust – however this proved unreliable as any oversized speck of coal would damage the turbine blades.



I think it is significant that the ACE program was never brought to fruition. Railroad firms are not inherently conservative – this is demonstrated by the GTEL locomotives, and also by CN’s TurboTrain. I think the project never came to pass because railroads in the United States are concerned with appearing modern, and forward-looking. Returning to coal fired steam power might have tainted a railroads image, and would certainly not have been perceived as environmentally friendly. With the development of the computer to the point where it became usable in capitalist products, the 1980s were a period of rapid technological development. For instance, private cars in 1980 were not so different from 1960, and by 1990 bore many of the significant changes that make cars today “modern”, i.e. computer controlled ignition and fuel injection, modern crash testing and air bags, etc. Coal was not the right fit for this forward looking time and – hopefully – it remains the wrong fuel today.

Objections: cash, jobs, and taxes

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When you tell people that coal, the oil sands, and other unconventional oil and gas should be left underground, three objections come up most often:

  1. Look at how much revenue these industries produce!
  2. And so many jobs depend on them
  3. And they provide so much tax revenue

All this, they argue, means communities and governments should welcome, or at least tolerate, these industries.

I think there are four major responses to this.

1) What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen

It is easy to tot up the revenues from oil sands producers or coal mining companies, the number of people they employ, and the taxes they pay. What is less obvious but equally real is the harm these entities produce, which is not compensated for. Air and water pollution sicken and kill people, as well as harming natural ecosystems. Mining tears up and poisons the land. Greenhouse gas emissions cause warming, extreme weather, sea level rise, ocean acidification, and many other ills.

Once all the damage caused by climate change is taken into account, it seems highly likely that these businesses actually destroy more wealth and human welfare than they create, because the indirect costs overwhelm the direct benefits.

2) What is the alternative?

We cannot keep using fossil fuels forever. We will either burn them until there are none that remain to be economically extracted, or we will stop sooner because we want to limit climate change.

Either way, the global economy is eventually going to need to rely on renewable forms of energy. All the infrastructure we are building now to support fossil fuel use will eventually be redundant and useless. At the same time, the sooner we get started on building the energy system of the future, the more time we have to work out which options are best and perfect them. A longer time horizon also means we need to invest less of our total wealth per year, in order to get the same final result.

There are big opportunities to be captured in moving to a sustainable energy system, as well. We can free ourselves from dependence on fossil fuel imports, with all the geopolitical and security implications that would have. We can free ourselves from the burden of illness and death caused by fossil fuel pollution. We can live cleaner, healthier, and safer lives.

3) The risks from climate change

I am not going to exhaustively re-explain the reasons why we should be fearful of climate change. In short, we should be worried because the warming projected just from staying on our present course of increasing emissions is on the order of 5°C. That would create a world as different from the present one as the present one is different from the depth of an ice age. The human consequences of that are impossible to fully appreciate, but certain to be highly significant.

Ken Caldiera expresses this idea very effectively:

If we already had energy and transportation systems that met our needs without using the atmosphere as a waste dump for our carbon- dioxide pollution, and I told you that you could be 2% richer, but all you had to do was acidify the oceans and risk killing off coral reefs and other marine ecosystems, risk melting the ice caps with rapid sea-level rise, shifting weather patterns so that food-growing regions might not be able to produce adequate amounts of food, and so on, would you take all of that environmental risk, just to be 2% richer?

Beyond that, the warming we are creating risks kicking off positive feedback effects, which themselves produce more warming. An especially important danger is causing the permafrost and methane clathrates to melt. The methane they contain could cause another huge dose of warming, on top of what human beings produced directly. They could even kick off runaway climate change, which could make the planet permanently inhospitable to life.

4) Ethics

To enrich yourself by causing certain harm to others, and by creating terrible risks, is surely not an ethical way to comport yourself. There is no reason why future generations deserve to inherit a wrecked and imperiled planet, and it would be preferable for them to inhabit a global economy that is already moving towards making itself sustainable.

As Henry Shue argues, climate change falls within the general moral category of the infliction of harm upon the defenceless. When we undertake activities that produce massive greenhouse gas emissions, we are playing a game of Russian Roulette with the gun pointed at the head of future generations. Even if climate change proves to be less of a problem than we legitimately fear, we are behaving unethically by forcing this risk upon them without their consent, and without them having any ability whatsoever to seek recourse from us.

The History of Wood and Coal in Industrial Transport

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Prior to the easy availability of coal, rail and ship transport in North America was powered largely by chopped wood. Up until 1870 most railway locomotives in the United States ran on wood. Sternwheelers also ran on wood when and where coal was not (yet) available. Sternwheelers on Kootenay lake for instance, burned wood until the B.C. Southern Railway was extended to Kootenay Landing, connecting the lake with the coalfields of Crowsnest Pass. The 19th century consumption of wood by steamboat was described vividly by Basil Hall in his 1828 “Travels in North America”:

“As the steam-boats on this river [the Mississippi], and indeed all over America, burn nothing but wood, and as their engines are mostly high pressure, the consumption of this bulky description of fuel is so considerable, that they are obliged to call at least twice a day at the wooding stations on the banks of the stream. The Philelphia [a sternwheeler] used about a cord of wood an hour, or 128 cubic feet. A cord consists of a pile eight feet long by four high, and four in thickness, each billet being four feet in length. Sometimes, when we were pushing hard, we burnt 30 cords in a day.” (Vol. 3 page 348)

At this rate of wood consumption, one can imagine that the impact on the forest by even one sternwheeler would be obvious to passengers. John H. White’s book on 19th century American Railroading cites a peak wood consumption by U.S. railroads of 3.6 million cords per year.  Using the average “one cord per acre per year” rule, sustainable production of that amount of fuel would require more than 14 thousand square kilometres of forest. At a time when America had only 30,000 miles of trackage, whereas the current U.S. trackage is over 230,000 miles. Tonnage shipped has likely increased by a much greater ratio than that due to the increases in the power, weight and frequency of freight trains. Suffice it to say, it is unlikely that it would be possible to run the contemporary American rail network on wood powered steam locomotives today. In fact, we can probably attribute the continued growth of rail in the 19th century after the 1860s to developments in coal extraction – by 1880 trackage had increased to 90 thousand miles, while consumption of wood was cut to a third of the 1860s numbers.

The bitter truth, however, is that while superficially the forest powered infrastructure was much more environmentally destructive than the current coal and oil powered fleet,  the current system is  in reality worse by an order of magnitude. Deforestation is a real problem, but forests can grow back in the matter of a few generations, or at worst, centuries. Deforestation alone likely can not cause run away climate change. On the other hand, while the carbon spilled into the atmosphere by coal and oil based transportation systems has no obvious immediate effect,  in the medium to long term it has the disastrous effects of climate change, and if not mitigated, run-away climate change.

The implication of this contrast to me is the following: environmentalism as appreciation for our life-world in lived experience is insufficient for the problem of fossil fuel caused climate change. If all U.S. forests had been cut down to run trains, this would be an environmental disaster – but one which would likely precipitate a populist environmental response out of people’s experience of seeing the forests retreat. Analogous experiences of climate change are comparatively rare and murky (i.e. observations of glacier retreat), and have not yet been sufficient to garner the political will necessary to stop climate change. The connection between an engine spewing CO2 and a retreating glacier is infinitely less obvious than the connection between a chugging train and a retreating forest.

What we’re up against in Canada

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You can argue all you like that exploiting the oil sands is against the long-term interests of Canadians, given the climatic risks it poses. What is much harder is to overcome the influence of so much short-term cash.

This year, for the first time ever, royalties from the oil sands will eclipse those from any other energy resource in Alberta:

Oil sands royalties will outstrip conventional crude royalties by a modest $35-million this year, the government forecast in the budget tabled yesterday. By 2010-2011, the province expects oil sands royalties to roar to $3.2-billion, a 75-per-cent hike that will see bitumen production provide 45 per cent of the province’s total oil and gas royalties.

By 2012-2013, the oil sands will form 53 per cent of Alberta’s royalty stream, which will represent a quarter of total provincial revenues.

In the face of that, it is easy to dismiss the risk of catastrophic or runaway climate change as distant and uncertain. Unfortunately, given the enormous size of the world’s reserves of unconventional oil and gas – including the tar sands – exploiting them is the single thing we can do that most increases the probability of a truly terrible outcome for humanity. In addition, there are all the air and water pollution consequences that accompany oil sands exploitation, as well as the destruction of natural habitat.

Given the fact that most of the fuels being manufactured from Albertan bitumen will eventually be used for vehicles, even cheap and affordable carbon capture and storage (CCS) will not make it safe to exploit these resources. This makes Alberta’s CCS-focused provincial climate change plan laughably inadequate.

Coal power plants and mercury

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One of the most worrisome aspects of coal-fired electricity is the quantity of mercury it releases into the air. According to the United States Geological Survey, human activities have doubled or tripled the amount of mercury in the atmosphere, and the burden is increasing by 1.5% per year. The most significant source of these emissions are coal-fired power plants. Mercury has serious impacts on human health, for children, adults, and unborn fetuses. The US Environmental Protection Agency estimates that of the four million babies born annually, 630,000 “could be at risk for developmental disorders because of mercury exposure in the mother’s womb.” Fetuses are both more vulnerable and more exposed than their mothers, with mercury concentrations in umbilical cord blood 1.7 times those in the blood of the mother.

Mercury also bioaccumulates in the food chain, becoming more concentrated as smaller plants and animals are consumed by larger ones. This is one of the reasons why there is so much concern about the mercury content in the carnivorous fish people eat, like tuna.

This illustrates one of the major co-benefits of phasing out coal. In addition to reducing the risk of catastrophic or runaway climate change, it would reduce the exposure of human beings to demonstrably harmful pollutants in coal emissions including mercury, lead, arsenic, particulate matter, and more. Physicians for Social Responsibility have said that coal is an “assault on human health.” In a study conducted by the US National Research Council, they found that coal-fired power plants cause $62 billion of health costs a year, in the United States alone. Plenty of US coal emissions find their way into other countries, as well as into the oceans shared by everyone. By the same token, coal being burned in India and China influences human health in all other parts of the world.

Carbon capture and storage

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When the matter of ‘burying coal’ comes up, people naturally raise the question of whether we can dig coal up, burn it to access the energy it contains, and then return the climate-harming greenhouse gases (GHGs) it contained underground. This basic idea is called carbon capture and storage (CCS). Many people have high hopes for it as a climate change mitigation strategy. For users of fossil fuels, it seems to offer a route forward that doesn’t involve a fundamental change in what fuels we use. For environmentalists, it offers a way to reduce emissions from coal-rich states like China and the United States without asking them to take the politically difficult step of shutting down their coal industries. Paired with facilities burning biomass, CCS could even allow for negative emissions, since plants would draw carbon dioxide (CO2) from the air which would eventually be sequestered underground.

While I have argued before that it would be irresponsible to ignore CCS completely, I also think it is very important to remain aware of the risks and uncertainties. In short, we don’t know for sure whether CCS will be able to keep GHGs underground indefinitely. We don’t know whether CCS facilities will pose risks for humans or other living things in the vicinity. We don’t know how much CCS will cost, or even whether coal with CCS will actually be cheaper than renewable options like concentrating solar or wind. If coal with CCS doesn’t end up being cheaper than those, it is surely a less appealing option, since it still includes the air and water pollution that accompanies coal mining, as well as the habitat destruction, mercury emissions, etc. There are also big questions about how quickly CCS can be deployed, even if it works perfectly and is affordable. If we are going to avoid catastrophic climate change, we need to be phasing out coal without CCS on the timescale of a couple of decades. The enormous volumes of gas that would need to be seperated from power plant emissions, transported, and buried make it questionable how much of a role CCS can effectively play in that.

A further uncertainty is that the promise of CCS at some future point could serve to justify the continuance of the status quo. As The Economist pointed out:

CCS is not just a potential waste of money. It might also create a false sense of security about climate change, while depriving potentially cheaper methods of cutting emissions of cash and attention—all for the sake of placating the coal lobby.

Utilities that are based around coal-fired electrical production can argue that they will retrofit their plants at some future point, while simultaneously seeking delays in the implementation of carbon pricing and taxpayer dollars directed towards the investments that they – as the polluters – should really be funding.

In short, it seems like research into CCS should be permitted and even encouraged, given that it could be one of a suite of technologies that helps us to stabilize the climate. That said, citizens should not mistake vague promises to use CCS in the future for being akin to real emissions reductions now. They should also be wary of utility firms that want to make others pay for their pollution: if not by suffering the effects of climate change, then by paying for the equipment necessary for avoiding it.

Coal fires

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Uncontrolled surface and underground coal fires burn in over 15 countries around the world, including Australia, South Africa, and the United States (the fire beneath the town of Centralia, Pennsylvania is one of the better-known examples of this phenomenon). They are a particular problem in China, where they consume an estimated 15 to 20 million tonnes of coal per year.1

The occurrence of uncontrolled coal fires long predates industrial coal mining, and some still begin naturally. However, mining is the most important cause of coal fires today.2 3 By exposing coal to air, mining activities allow oxidation to take place, encouraging the spontaneous combustion that often causes the fires.4 In China, small coal mines operating without effective safety standards and precautions are especially problematic, and fires can also result from abandoned mines that have not been adequately sealed off.5

The relative obscurity of mining-induced coal fires belies their potentially severe environmental impacts. Uncontrolled coal fires emit large quantities of greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide.6 It has been estimated that emissions from Chinese coal fires alone represent 0.1-0.3 per cent of all human-induced carbon dioxide emissions7 – yet, due to uncertainty surrounding the prevalence of these fires and their impacts, their emissions are generally not accounted for in climate modeling exercises.8

Beyond their climate impacts, uncontrolled coal fires contribute to methyl mercury build-up in global fish stocks and, ultimately, in humans.9 Air pollution from coal fires damages plant life10 and harms human health, causing increased rates of lung cancer and other respiratory diseases among people living nearby.11 Consumption of coal by underground fires can lead to the opening of dangerous cracks in the earth. In China, coal fires are also a significant cause of fatal coal mining accidents.12

Research is ongoing to better locate, map, and control coal fires. While environmental impacts are frequently noted as a concern, another motivation is the desire to access coal deposits that are either in danger of being consumed by the fires or rendered unmineable by their proximity to them. 13 14

While eliminating coal fires brought on or exacerbated by mining is a worthy goal, it is somewhat undermined when the intent is further coal extraction and combustion, which carries its own significant environmental costs. Rather than being considered an impediment to coal use, uncontrolled coal fires should be viewed as an additional danger associated with continued reliance on this resource – one that remains long after mining projects have ended and attention has turned elsewhere.

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