by John Kaufman
photo by Corey Gaffer
LJ Turner is a classic, modern-day cowboy. His family has owned a cattle ranch in Campbell County, Wyo., since 1918. For years, he leased thousands of acres of federal land as summer pasture for his cows. But now the land has been taken from him and is being leased to coal mines.
“A hundred years ago, 98 percent of the people in Wyoming were in an occupation connected to agriculture,” Turner says. “Today it is 2 percent. The ‘highest and best use’ [under state law] of much of Wyoming ranch land is coal mining.”
As coal is mined, the dust blows across the land, damaging human lungs, ponds and rivers, soil, forest and farmland. Aquifers that feed natural springs and wells are being destroyed. The Turner ranch has lost four wells due to the mining, the water table under his land has dropped 5 feet, and a creek that ran through his property has dried up. The family now drinks bottled water. Some of his cattle have developed “dust pneumonia,” Turner says, which “makes mud out of their lungs,” and can be fatal.
These are not old-fashioned, underground mines, but strip mines in which giant machines scrape away all topsoil, vegetation and trees, and then scoop up the coal below. The machines are produced by two Milwaukee companies, Bucyrus International and Joy Global (formerly Harnischfeger), which earn 70 to 80 percent of their revenue selling them to mining companies. Most of the world’s strip mines depend on these two Milwaukee manufacturers. As a result, the coal industry has a huge impact on Milwaukee and contributes an estimated $2 billion annually to the state’s economy.
We Energies, meanwhile, relies upon these mines for the coal used to produce electricity for the Milwaukee metro area. About 10 million tons – much of it from Wyoming – will be consumed by Milwaukee in 2009. Though Wisconsin is one of just 13 states without coal deposits, it is far more dependent on coal: 70 percent of our energy comes from coal, compared to 50 percent nationally.
The mining and burning of coal has almost epically disastrous impacts. In Appalachia alone, strip mines have destroyed 450 mountains, 700,000 acres of forest and buried 1,200 miles of headwater streams. The American Lung Association estimates that the burning of coal kills 24,000 Americans, causes 38,200 heart attacks and 554,000 asthma attacks every year. The worldwide numbers are far higher and likely to increase: China has an almost unlimited appetite for coal and has become a key customer for Milwaukee’s strip-mining machines.
Milwaukee Conquers Wyoming
The origins of Milwaukee’s near-monopoly of this industry go back to a young man whose first goal was to become a monk. Henry Harnischfeger grew up in Germany and flirted with joining the Franciscan Order, only to be persuaded by his religious superiors to go into locksmithing instead. Thus an industrialist was born.
Harnischfeger immigrated to the U.S. and arrived in Milwaukee in 1881, where he was co-founder of a machine and pattern shop. The company was named after Harnischfeger and went on to build cranes, land-excavators and, eventually, mining and construction machinery.
Harnischfeger purchased underground mining manufacturer Joy Mining of Warrendale, Pa., to complement its surface mining subsidiary, P & H Mining. After filing for bankruptcy in 1999, Harnischfeger emerged as the scaled-down company Joy Global, which has its corporate headquarters in Milwaukee and a factory in West Milwaukee.
Bucyrus International, by contrast, started out not in Milwaukee, but in Bucyrus, Ohio, in 1880, manufacturing products for the railroad industry. Bucyrus was lured to Wisconsin in 1893 by real estate promoters who had bought up farmland and formed the South Milwaukee Company, with the express purpose of founding an industrial center to compete with Milwaukee. Offered 15 acres of land and $50,000, Bucyrus kept its name and moved to the newly created South Milwaukee, where it is still headquartered, and soon began building mining shovels as well as canal dredges that helped dig the Panama Canal.
In 1910, Bucyrus bought the rights for the Heyworth-Newman “dragline excavator,” and so began its rise to prominence in the manufacture of mining machines. Bucyrus, too, would file for bankruptcy in the 1990s, only to emerge from it and purchase its primary dragline competitor, Marion Power Shovel Company, in 1997. Ten years later, Bucyrus acquired the German underground mining company DBT.
P & H Mining, Joy Global’s surface mining subsidiary, has, according to its Web site, made more than 70 percent of the earth-stripping electric shovels sold over the last 10 years to mining companies all over the world. Bucyrus manufactured 88 percent of the draglines sold worldwide in 2007. There are, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel,some 400 Bucyrus draglines in operation globally.
Joy Global earned some $3.4 billion in revenue in 2008 and employs some 12,000 people around the world, including 900 in the Milwaukee area. Bucyrus, with some $2.5 billion in revenue in 2008, has 7,000 employees worldwide, with 1,600 in the Milwaukee metro area. From a manufacturing perspective, Milwaukee is the strip-mining capital of the world.
Wyoming wasn’t a prime candidate for such mines until the updated Clean Air Act was passed in 1970 requiring power plants to achieve stricter pollution standards. Suddenly, the Wyodak coal seam – a vast source of low-sulfur, clean-burning coal that could be easily strip-mined – became valuable. Near Wright, Wyo., is Arch Coal Inc.’s vast Black Thunder Mine, one of the largest open-pit coal mines in the United States at 38 square miles.
There you’ll find, according to Mining-Technology.com,a Bucyrus-made walking dragline nicknamed “Ursa Major” – the largest mining machine now operating in the U.S. – and other Bucyrus draglines and Joy Global electric shovels. A typical shovel is about the size of a large house with a long boom and bucket attached. A Bucyrus dragline is more like a tank that’s the size of a factory: 20 stories tall, capable of digging a man-made gorge 213 feet deep. Draglines are so huge that they must be assembled on the mining site and require an external power line of their own. The “Big Muskie,” a dragline made by Bucyrus in 1969, is considered the largest ever built. You can still see the “12-car garage” bucket, as it is known, down in Noble County, Ohio, at Miners’ Memorial Park.
What draglines drag away is what strip miners call the “overburden” – that is, everything above the coal seam, including soil and trees. Electric shovels then scoop the coal into huge trucks to be taken for washing, crushing and storage before the coal is loaded onto trains for transport.
Shannon Anderson of the Powder River Basin Resource Council, a grassroots group, says Black Thunder, like the 14 other strip mines in the Powder River Basin, is a major source of pollution. “Particulate matter, the dust from strip-mining, is a real problem,” Anderson says. “Most of it is generated by trucks that carry the coal between the draglines and storage areas. There have been air quality permit violations at Black Thunder. They are often excused because of ‘high-wind events,’ anything over 20 miles per hour, but in this part of Wyoming, that’s a pretty common event.” Wyoming leads the nation in average annual wind speed.
“The mining area stretches for some 60 miles and is 10 miles wide, and all that’s being blown across the middle of the nation,” Turner says. He notes the irony of the signs posted around strip mines warning against the air pollution. One such sign reads: “Active blasting operations are conducted which may result in an orange cloud. The cloud is comprised of dust and nitrogen dioxide gas. Avoid direct and prolonged exposure…”
Strip-mining in the Powder River Basin is also hard on local water supplies. Generally, the coal seams in the West also function as aquifers that are tapped by wells and feed natural springs. So when explosives and machines remove the coal, they are also removing groundwater that ranchers and wildlife need to survive. Though mining companies are required by law to restore “hydrologic balance,” the companies and the federal Bureau of Land Management say it will take at least 200 years for the aquifers to be restored. “Reclamation methods can make the land’s contours look much like they once did,” Anderson says, “but restoring and refilling aquifers – no one really knows how long it would take or if it’s really possible. You can’t ranch on reclaimed land without water.”
Reclamation in Wyoming and the West is “shockingly slow,” according to a report by the National Resources Defense Council and the Western Organization of Resource Councils. Between 1997 and 2007, about 23,000 acres of mined Western land was fully reclaimed, while 400,000 acres were newly mined. When reclamation does occur, what grows back leaves a lot to be desired. “We get noxious weeds instead of sagebrush,” says Anderson.
And sagebrush, she notes, is needed by the sage grouse, a critical actor in the local ecology. “Ninety percent of sage grouse diet is sagebrush,” says Eric Molvar, wildlife biologist and executive director of the Biodiversity Conservation Alliance based in Laramie, Wyo. Sage grouse numbers in the area have declined by 93 percent, and the bird is likely to soon be listed as endangered.
Sagebrush steppe, considered one of the world’s most endangered ecosystems, is also home to pygmy rabbits, ground squirrels and deer mice, and provides crucial winter food for deer, elk and moose, which graze on the tall sagebrush when the grass is buried by snow. “The Sagebrush Sea supports an estimated 250 terrestrial vertebrate species, including 100 bird and 70 mammal species,” writes Mark Salvo of WildEarth Guardians in an October 2008 report. Sagebrush is critical to maintaining that system.
Strip-mining Appalachia
Folk singer John Prine spent his summers in Kentucky as a child. In 1971, he debuted his now-famous song “Paradise.” One verse goes like this: Then the coal company came with the world’s largest shovel/And they tortured the timber and stripped all the land/ Well, they dug for their coal till the land was forsaken/Then they wrote it all down as the progress of man.
The “shovel” Prine refers to was the “Big Hog,” a Bucyrus-Erie 3850-B dragline built in 1962. At that time it was, indeed, the biggest digger on earth. After stripping off 5,000 acres of land over many years, the Big Hog ran out of coal in its Kentucky mine in 1985, and rather than move it to another mine, the Peabody Coal Company had the Big Hog dig a big hole – about 400 feet deep, twice the machine’s height – and then buried it. Some in Muhlenberg County, according to the Messenger-Inquirerof Owensboro, Ky., would like to dig up the old dragline and use it to attract tourists.
Since Prine penned his song, strip-mining in the Appalachian Mountains has wiped out at least 700,000 acres of forest, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Writing in the January 2009 issue of Smithsonianmagazine, John McQuaid, who has reported about many disasters, including war, wrote that “in the sheer audacity of its destruction, mountaintop coal removal is the most shocking thing I’ve ever seen.”
For every ton of strip-mined coal, there are 16 tons of rock that must be disposed of, and miners generally dump it into nearby valleys or hollows to fall on forests and headwater streams. In 2003, the EPA estimated that more than 1,200 miles of headwater streams in the Appalachians (in Kentucky, Virginia, West Virginia and Tennessee) have been buried forever. Other waterways have been polluted by acid mine waste, created when the mined rock is exposed to air and water. Big boulders have crashed into houses; a sleeping boy, age 3, was killed in Virginia in 2004 when a boulder from a mine site rolled into his bedroom. Coal waste basins have collapsed, flooding and poisoning the land below. Explosions can damage nearby houses, spreading coal dust over everything. Wells near mines often run dry.
Many mines in Appalachia literally remove mountains. According to the respected conservation organization Appalachian Voices, based in Boone, N.C., more than 450 mountains have been beheaded in Appalachia so far, their height reduced as much as 600 feet.
Kent Henschen, director of corporate communications for Bucyrus International, would not comment on strip-mining’s environmental damage nor divulge which corporations buy draglines and shovels from Bucyrus. But the latest investor relations presentation from Bucyrus lists Arch Coal and Foundation Coal as customers. Both coal companies, directly or through subsidiaries, practice mountaintop-removal mining.
Joy Global did not respond to repeated interview requests, but its “Business Overview” brochure for Fall 2003 has a list of major customers that includes Consol Energy, Massey Energy and Arch Coal, mountain strip miners all.
Joy Global’s Web site used to feature a photograph of a reclaimed strip mine somewhere in West Virginia. The photograph displayed a bucolic pasture and verdant forest. Beneath the photo, readers were informed that “mining is both a high-tech industry and a guardian of our natural resources, employing more engineers and environmental scientists as a percentage than most any other industry.”
The National Mining Association claims that about 2.2 million acres of mined lands have been restored since 1978 “to their original or better condition.” Golf courses, prisons and airports are popular developments on former mountains; one scalped mountain in Virginia is now graced with a Wal-Mart. But most former mountains that are reclaimed are simply sown with grass.
In truth, it’s not easy to return strip-mined land to its original condition. Not after the forested summit of the mountain is bulldozed clear – trees and soil are scraped away, and sometimes the valuable lumber is burned or left to rot. Next, the rock above the coal seam is blasted apart and removed by big electric shovels or draglines to reveal the horizontal coal seams.
Consider Lost Mountain, which was strip-mined for coal and which author Erik Reece wrote about in “Death of a Mountain” in Harper’sof April 2005. Reece visited the mountain in the fall of 2003. He found the tracks of deer, foxes, raccoons and wild turkeys. He heard a woodpecker, saw squirrels and a Carolina wren, noted a large stand of tulip poplar, Kentucky’s state tree, as well as sassafras, hickory, beech and sugar maple. The Appalachian Mountains contain “the oldest and most diverse forests in North America,” Reece wrote.
But after it was mined, Lost Mountain was a very different place. In April of 2005, a group of prominent Kentucky authors, including Reece, took a two-day tour of strip-mined areas in Eastern Kentucky. They then issued a statement:
“During our two-day tour of mountaintop removal sites in Eastern Kentucky, we saw buried and polluted streams, great hickories and oaks tossed into useless piles, life-giving mountains turned into barren moonscapes, wasted topsoil, and sunken homes, the lowering of a people’s quality of life, the increased severity and frequency of flooding, the lost jobs and lost hopes of an entire place. These are not isolated or occasional incidents. Instead, they are an assault on the people, culture, and land of Appalachia.”
China and Pennsylvania
On a festive evening at the Pfister Hotel on May 13, Tim Sullivan, CEO of Bucyrus International, was jointly honored as the 2008 Business Leader of the Year by the Harvard Business School Club of Wisconsin and the MilwaukeeJournal Sentinel. Gov. Jim Doyle was the keynote speaker, and he saluted Sullivan’s business leadership. “He has found markets in every corner of the world,” Doyle declared.
One of those markets is China. Seven months earlier, in October 2008, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, Sullivan, and MMAC President Tim Sheehy traveled to China with the Milwaukee Bucks. The three men took a tour of two of China’s largest strip mines to see a Bucyrus dragline and other strip-mining machines in action. According to a Bucyrus media release dated Oct. 20, 2008, it was Barrett’s first visit to a strip mine. Bucyrus posted a photograph of the three Milwaukeeans wearing white hard hats and white gloves as they stood on the deck of the Bucyrus 8750-AC walking dragline, the first to operate in China. Barrett, according to the press release, was “impressed” by the size of the equipment and “heard much about … the critical role that Bucyrus plays in the power generation sector of China.”
In an interview later with Milwaukee Magazine, Barrett was asked if he had any concerns about the environmental impact of the mine. “My only concern is that all environmental standards be adhered to,” he said. “It is my understanding the mine will be reclaimed.” Barrett called back to emphasize that “Bucyrus is a good company that does a lot for the city.”
The Bucyrus dragline that Barrett and Sheehy observed is in a strip mine called Heidaigou, which could become China’s first “world class strip mine,” according to the China Mining Journal. The mine sprawls over 16 square miles on the Ordos Plateau, an arid region of Inner Mongolia that suffers from soil erosion and sandification due to decades of overgrazing, deforestation and open-pit mining.
A February 2007 report by the National Resources Defense Council states that coal mining in China has “destroyed 4 million hectares of land [almost 10 million acres], a figure that increases by more than 46,000 hectares [113,668 acres] each year; only 12 percent of this land has been reclaimed.” Eighty percent of China’s electric power comes from coal, and the ecological and health toll has been enormous. Studies by Columbia and Yale have linked air pollution in China to chromosomal damage and underweight births, according to the China Daily.Researchers at China’s Unirule Institute of Economics and Shanxi Academy of Social Sciences calculated that the environmental harm from burning coal was greater than $255 billion in 2007, or more than 7 percent of China’s gross domestic product.
It is “longwall” mining that now dominates China’s coal market. “We like the longwall aspect of DBT [the German underground mining company bought by Bucyrus] just for the fact that coal mining in China, which is the largest coal market in the world, is 90 percent longwall,” Sullivan told The Business Journalback in 2007. And last year, Joy Global acquired a Chinese manufacturer of longwall mining machines.
Longwall shearing is a sort of underground strip-mining that causes the ground above the tunnels to collapse in what the coal companies call “planned subsidence.” Unlike traditional “room and pillar” mining, longwall shearing machines leave no profitless columns of coal behind to keep the rock above the coal seam from collapsing. As the longwall shearer slices off layers of coal, making cuts as wide as 1,000 feet, the surface above the tunnel falls down, usually subsiding 4 or 5 feet. With the proper permits in hand, coal companies do not need permission to tunnel beneath a house or anything else. They mine first and try to fix the problems later. As the demand for coal has increased, this very efficient, but destructive, method of mining has grown in use. Today in the U.S., about 50 percent of underground coal mining is longwall mining, which in turn produces 10 percent of the nation’s power.
Longwall mining has been used in the northern Appalachian highlands known as “the coalfield” south of Pittsburgh, Pa. The counties of Greene and Washington have two of the biggest underground coal mines in the nation: Bailey and Enlow Fork. Together, these longwall mines, both owned by Consol Energy, encompass 62,676 acres.
According to The Center for Public Integrity, more than 1,800 complaints of longwall mining damage to houses, streams, wells and farmland have been filed with the state of Pennsylvania so far. This does not include damage to public roads, railways and dams.
In December of 2008, the Center for Coalfield Justice, a coalition of concerned citizens in southwestern Pennsylvania, called on the acting secretary of the state’s Department of Environmental Protection to close the Enlow Fork mine after a stream that flows over one of the mine’s tunnels was “dewatered.” The group’s press release states:
“Crafts Creek is only the latest in a series of streams that have been destroyed by
subsidence from longwall mining. Longwall mining as currently practiced in Pennsylvania has had disastrous consequences for the Commonwealth’s water resources. The [state] must halt operations at Enlow Fork immediately until it can be proven that no additional damage will occur. One reasonable solution would be to utilize room and pillar mining under streams including the balance of Crafts Creek.”
Consol Energy claims it can restore such streams by “grouting” the streambeds, but a study by the West Virginia Water Research Institute found that on streams above longwall mines in West Virginia, “there was no indication that the physical, chemical, or biological impacts of longwall mined streams recover over time.”
“It’s short-term thinking,” charges Raina Rippel, executive director of the Center for Coalfield Justice in Washington, Pa. “While we support manufacturing and industry, we cannot support the fracturing of our land and communities. Longwall mining is a two-edged sword: It provides some jobs and the mining is safer, but there has been a net loss of mining jobs [because the machines displace jobs], most jobs are nonunion, and then there is the surface damage that harms so many other sources of our economy, like agriculture, trout fishing and forests.”
Joy Global’s underground mining subsidiary, Joy Mining, based in Warrendale, Pa., boasts of making 90 percent of the longwall shearing machines used in the U.S. The Center for Coalfield Justice confirmed that some of the longwall equipment in the Bailey and Enlow Fork mines was manufactured by Joy Mining.
One buyer of Pennsylvania coal is We Energies. The two new units of its Oak Creek power plant will use the coal supplied by the Bailey and Enlow Fork longwall mines. The new coal plants were designed to burn “Pittsburgh No. 8” coal, a bituminous coal high in energy and high in sulfur that is abundant in northern Appalachia. According to Doug Wetjen, manager of Coal Resources for We Energies, this type of coal was chosen “after evaluating numerous factors, including plant efficiency, community impacts [e.g., number of trains needed for transport], environmental impacts [e.g., air emissions], coal reserves and reliability of supply, and the estimated cost to construct, operate, maintain, and fuel the plant.”
When asked to comment on the ecological harm of longwall mining, We Energies spokesman Bruce Browne responded, “This particular question might be better answered by one of the longwall mining companies.”
Milwaukee Coal Futures
While We Energies will use Pennsylvania coal in Oak Creek, it is also a major user of Wyoming coal. In 1980, We Energies built its Pleasant Prairie power plant in Kenosha County. In 1985 it added more capacity. The plant was built specifically to burn the low-sulfur, sub-bituminous Wyoming coal, but while Powder River Basin coal is low in sulfur, it is also lower in energy output and high in elemental mercury. We Energies made this decision to save money: It could have chosen to build plants that burn the more expensive high-sulfur, bituminous coal and install sulfur dioxide emission controls (that can capture both sulfur and mercury) back in the 1980s. Having made this choice, We Energies and the other power utilities in the state that primarily burn sub-bituminous Western coal are now locked into this position.
Currently, 86 percent of the mercury in Wisconsin’s atmosphere comes from coal-fired plants. A 2007 citizen petition to the state’s Department of Natural Resources called for significant mercury reduction (90 percent by 2012). But Wisconsin utilities argue there is little they can do to meet that mark, there being no proven, cost-effective technology available to remove the mercury from Wyoming’s coal.
In a ruling on the petition issued in June 2008, the DNR said, as a matter of fact, there are now commercial technologies available to remove almost all mercury from large, coal-burning power plants at a reasonable cost. The DNR settled for a 90 percent cut by 2015, rather than the 2012 date in the citizen petition.
Recently installed scrubbers have reduced mercury output at Pleasant Prairie, but the level remains high. In November 2008, the Environmental Integrity Project issued a report that ranked the Pleasant Prairie plant 28th in the nation for the amount of mercury emitted per kilowatt-hour and 40th for total mercury emitted.
The impact of mercury pollution was noted by Janet Larsen of the Earth Policy Institute back in 2004: “Research shows that one out of every six women of childbearing age in the United States may have blood mercury concentrations high enough to damage a developing fetus. This means that 630,000 of the 4 million babies born in the country each year are at risk of neurological damage because of exposure to dangerous mercury levels in the womb.”
The Wisconsin DNR has noted that two studies conducted in Wisconsin found 6 percent of women of childbearing age have elevated levels of mercury and about 437,000 men and women are exposed to levels of mercury judged unsafe by the EPA. Other research, according to the DNR, has linked mercury to harmful effects on the immune system and to potential increases in heart disease and heart attacks.
Michael Vickerman, executive director of RENEW Wisconsin, a nonprofit that promotes clean energy, points out that it would be “extremely difficult” to produce and sell enough electricity for Wisconsin without using some coal. But, he adds, “We’re still headed in the wrong direction, with two new coal stations on the way that by themselves will produce nearly 10 percent of the state’s electricity.”
In an appearance on the CNBC show “Mad Money,” Gale Klappa, CEO of We Energies, discussed a recent experiment at the Pleasant Prairie plant that used ammonia to capture carbon before it leaves the stacks.
Host Jim Cramer was dubious, saying, “We are really far away from clean coal, aren’t we?” Cramer was referring to news reports stating that, while 90 percent of the carbon dioxide was removed in tests using the ammonia capture system, We Energies was only extracting 1 percent of the carbon from the stack exhaust at the Pleasant Prairie plant.
Klappa’s response: “Well, I’m not ready to give up. … This experiment worked extremely well in the lab, and we’re working the bugs out. … I think the technology still has real potential.”
An even more difficult issue may be removing carbon dioxide cost-effectively. The Government Accountability Office estimates that adding carbon dioxide removal technology to coal plants would raise the price of electric power another 7 cents per kilowatt-hour, nearly doubling the average national price of electricity, about 9.8 cents per kilowatt-hour in 2008.
The Wisconsin Safe Climate Act would have mandated reduction of carbon dioxide to 1990 levels by 2020, but it didn’t achieve enough support to become law last year.
Gov. Doyle’s “Clean Energy Wisconsin” plan shoots for 25 percent renewable energy by 2025. His Global Warming Task Force issued a final report in 2008 recommending increasingly stringent reductions in greenhouse gas emissions beginning in 2014 and culminating in 2050 (by which time emissions must be reduced 75 percent from 2005 levels). Meanwhile, the Doyle administration has come out in favor of state-supported research and development for “clean coal” carbon capture technology.
“ ‘Clean coal’ is industry-generated, patently oxymoronic spin,” Vickerman contends. “Coal is carbon; it is not possible to decarbonize the resource with end-of-pipe measures. … Burying the CO2 somewhere is simply not cost-effective, and probably not a permanent measure either. … The only cost-effective way to sequester carbon is to leave the coal in the ground.”
The Battle Over Coal
Perhaps no public official has worked harder to oppose strip-mining than Ken Hechler, a former U.S. Representative (1959-1977) and secretary of state (1985-2001) for West Virginia. In 1971, he introduced a bill to ban it, co-sponsored, at one time, by 90 of his fellow congressmen, including Wisconsin Sen. Gaylord Nelson. But to Hechler’s dismay, a different bill was passed with an amendment authorizing mountaintop- removal mining in 1977. Since then, actions by various courts, governments and agencies have managed to render the law all but useless.
The Obama administration has, so far, supported the “clean coal” approach and has shown no signs of opposing mountaintop-removal mining. On May 15, U.S. Rep. Nick Rahall (D-W.V.), long a supporter of the coal industry, announced that the EPA had ruled in favor of 42 of the 48 strip-mining permits under review. Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club, condemned this as “a leap in the wrong direction.” Pope called on the Obama administration to “take bold action to protect communities, streams and mountains before it’s too late.” The EPA later issued a statement intended to minimize the impact of the 42 permits, noting that “28 of the projects have two or fewer valley fills. Eleven have no valley fills at all. None have more than six.”
The industry’s defenders point to the jobs it creates. “Coal Means Jobs” was the rallying cry of Bucyrus and Joy Global representatives during Public Service Commission hearings on We Energies’ proposed Oak Creek plants in September 2003. But national statistics suggest that coal means increasing unemployment. In 1923, coal mining companies employed 704,793 miners, according to the National Mining Association; by 2007, the number of coal mining jobs had dropped to 81,278. Since 1990, mining jobs in West Virginia have decreased 45 percent due to mechanization. Where it used to take hundreds of miners working for decades to extract the coal from a mountain, Lost Mountain was strip-mined using just nine men.
In 2008, wind power jobs alone rose to 85,000, reports the American Wind Energy Association, outnumbering coal mining jobs for the first time. Renewable energy and energy-efficiency jobs totaled 504,000 and 8.6 million, respectively, in 2007, for a total of more than 9 million jobs, according to a study by the nonprofit American Solar Energy Society.
A July 2008 Worldwatch Institute report confirms coal’s unemployment trend: “Renewables tend to be a more labor-intensive energy source than the still-dominant fossil fuels, which rely heavily on expensive pieces of production equipment. A transition toward renewables thus promises job gains.”
Some experts argue that, whatever its problems, coal is indispensable. Kenneth P. Green, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and author of a global warming textbook for middle-school students, has argued we should “maximize the availability of less-expensive energy, while being environmentally responsible.”
Iconoclastic Princeton physicist Freeman Dyson, now 85 and author of many books and an anti-nuclear weapons activist, believes that carbon dioxide is good for agriculture and that biotechnology could eventually create super trees to consume our excess gas. Dyson considers himself a “humanist” – someone who places human concerns like poverty and injustice above ecological issues. “The move of the populations of China and India from poverty to middle-class prosperity should be the great historic achievement of the century,” he told the The New York Times. “Without coal it cannot happen.”
Coal does indeed seem cheap: It sold for as little as $8.75 a ton on the spot market last year. But many experts argue it is far more expensive when all of its external costs – to human health, air, land and water – are included. Economists Todd Cherry of Appalachian State University and Jason Shogren of the University of Wyoming at Laramie have concluded that the real price of coal, taking human and environmental factors into account, is more like $150 per ton.
Professor Robert Williams of the Princeton Environmental Institute has calculated that coal plants, on average, produce about 13 cents of air polluting “harm” per kilowatt-hour of electricity. If this external cost, which does not include the costs of carbon dioxide, were added to utility bills, demand would probably drop like overburden into a stream.
A November 2008 report produced by Greenpeace and CE Delft, a Dutch research institute, estimated the total cost of destruction caused by the mining and burning of coal at $451 billion annually.
A recent study by the environmental research firm Downstream Strategies found that Coal River Mountain in West Virginia would be much better off with wind turbines on top of the mountain instead of a strip mine. Over the course of its average life, a mountaintop-removal mine costs about $600 million when such external factors as health and ecological damage are calculated, according to the report, while a mountain wind farm would be profitable and provide jobs just about forever. A follow-up study found a wind farm would generate $1.7 million in taxes for the county every year, while the strip mine would provide $36,000 for the 17 years or so of mining. The study was done in response to Massey Energy’s plan to remove 10 square miles of mountaintop.
Massey Energy responded by telling CNN it is looking into placing wind turbines on former strip mines. But conservationists say that lowering the mountains lowers the wind speed. Rory McIlmoil of Coal River Mountain Watch told CNN that, “Every time Massey Energy sets up a blast [to expose the coal], a wind farm loses megawatts.”
On Feb. 3 of 2009, five activists chained themselves to strip-mining machines on top of Coal River Mountain. The protesters demanded the top of the mountain be used for generating wind energy instead. They were arrested along with eight others who tried to take a letter of protest to the Massey Energy office.
On May 23, Hechler, now 94, joined a coordinated protest against mountaintop-removal mining at three sites in southern West Virginia. Seventeen protesters were arrested, mostly for trespassing, but not Hechler. Police declined to arrest the well-known West Virginia politician. And on May 29, Ohio State University President E. Gordon Gee, after much pressure from environmental groups and more than 6,000 letters, many from schoolchildren and OSU students, resigned from the board of directors of Massey Energy.
We Energies, meanwhile, offers a way for local consumers and businesses to immediately help increase the amount of nonpolluting energy the utility produces or buys. Called “Energy for Tomorrow,” the independently certified program allows utility customers to pay more for power generated through wind, hydro, biomass and solar sources. It costs about $10 per month extra for an average household customer to be fully involved in the program. According to the utility, more than 17,000 customers have signed up. Organizations that participate at some level include Miller Brewing, GE Healthcare, Neenah Paper and Milwaukee’s City Hall. Neither Bucyrus nor Joy Global are listed among the many corporate participants on the “Energy for Tomorrow” Web site.
And out on the Powder River Basin, some are beginning to embrace wind power. Wyoming, remember, is the windiest state in the nation. Shannon Anderson of the Powder River Basin Resource Council writes, “We’re trying to promote a just transition from fossil fuel development to renewables and energy efficiency. Several of our members are working to promote utility-scale wind projects on their land.”
Rancher LJ Turner is among the wind enthusiasts and hopes to place three wind turbines on his ranch soon. He’s not going anywhere, Turner says, despite the problems the mines have brought. “I was here before the damn mining,” he says. “And I will remain here, one way or another.”
John Kaufman is a freelance writer. Reach him at letters@milwaukeemagazine.com.
