Coal Kills Kids

On Monday, the Montana State Land Board decided to delay a decision on leasing the state-owned parcels of coal in the Otter Creek tracts. “The board said more time is needed for the public to examine the proposed bid-letting.” The real reason was likely to let them figure out how to maximize the monetary return, but we’ll go with their publicly stated purpose. They have given us another thirty days to comment on the leases.

The Otter Creek tracts are a small part of Montana’s 5.1 million acres of school trust lands. These lands are used to provide revenue for our public schools and university system. By now we all know that the US gets about 50% of our electricity by burning coal which is the filthiest source of power going. Burning coal is a leading cause of smog, acid rain, global warming, and air pollution. Coal plants put millions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere each day, endangering our fragile planet.

Yesterday, Physicians for Social Responsibility along with the American Lung Association and the American Nurses Association, released a report on the devastating human health impacts of the entire life cycle of mining and burning coal and disposing of wastes. The report found that,

Coal pollutants affect all major body organ systems and contribute to four of the five leading causes of mortality in the U.S.: heart disease, cancer, stroke, and chronic lower respiratory diseases.

They also found that the impacts of coal pollutants fall disproportionately on children, contributing to decreased lung development,  asthma, increases in infant mortality, reduced IQ and mental retardation. And,

Unless we address coal, the U.S. will be unable to achieve the reductions in carbon emissions necessary to stave off the worst health impacts of global warming.

Is this really the way we want to support Montana children? Contributing to their health problems today and reducing their survival chances in the future? Many countries have already come to the conclusion that burning coal is not a viable source of power for the future. “Australia is turning away from coal. Just one of the power stations under construction around the country is set to be fueled by coal, with investors instead turning to gas and wind to provide the electricity of the future.” In Washington state there is only one remaining coal-fired power plant and some see this new report as one more reason to make Washington the first “Coal Free State“.

Is coal really the legacy we want to leave Montana’s children? The Otter Creek coal could not come on line for at least a decade and by then we will be well into the global push to replace our dirty energy sources with cleaner alternatives. There are many, many good reasons why mining the Otter Creek tracts is a really bad deal for Montana, but most of all we should not claim that we are helping our kids by becoming the “Saudi Arabia of Coal“. Please let the members of the State Land Board know that we don’t want our children to inherit a planet that we made worse using a false justification of helping them. Please write or call the Land Board.

Gov. Brian Schweitzer — (406) 444-3111, governor@mt.gov

Superintendent of Public Instruction, Denise Juneau — In-State Toll-Free 1-888-231-9393, Local (406) 444-3095 OPISupt@mt.gov

Attorney General Steve Bullock – (406) 444-2026 contact doj@mt.gov

State Auditor Monica Lindeen – (406) 444-2040 mlindeen@mt.gov

Secretary of State Linda McCulloch – (406) 444-2034 sos.mt.gov

Book Report: The Big Burn

Many years ago I was working for the Forest Service in the upper St. Joe River drainage in Northern Idaho. All around the valley were reminders of the largest forest fire ever to hit the United States. The black skeletons of monster white pines and cedars still stood sentinel 100 feet above thick even-aged stands of green forest. Back then, I was fortunate to read The Big Blowup by a local author, Betty Goodwin Spencer. Ms. Spencer had the opportunity to interview some of the last remaining eyewitnesses to the 1910 fire and capture their stories. That book is unfortunately no longer in print, but can be found used if you are diligent.

A new book by Timothy Egan, The Big Burn gave me the chance to revisit the history of the 1910 fire. If you have been fortunate enough to live around northwest Montana or northern Idaho for any length of time, you know the basic story. August 20, 1910, hurricane-force winds coalescing a thousand small fires into a mammoth firestorm the likes of which no one had ever seen. Three million acres of timber burned in 48 hours. Nearly a hundred dead and millions of dollars of property lost. We know the stories of Ranger Ed Pulaski who lead his crew through the firestorm to safety in the War Eagle mine and kept them there as the inferno burned over them. Young Ranger Joe Halm and his crew taking refuge in a small creek as fire raged about them, all given up for dead for several days. Survivors walking out through a smoking lunar landscape with their shoes and clothes burned off.  Wallace, Idaho burned to the ground in hours.

Egan goes well beyond the history of those few days of terror. He delves into the history of the U.S. Forest Service and how it was created against the odds by Teddy Roosevelt, Gifford Pinchot and John Muir. He gives an excellent history of how our National Forests came into being during the heyday of the robber barons of timber and mining using political maneuvers that were untested up to that time. Making extensive use of historical archives, Egan is able to paint a compelling picture of one of the greatest environmental catastrophes ever recorded and how it was later used to bolster the fortunes of the fledgling Forest Service. The 1910 fire was also directly responsible for the zero tolerance approach to fire that has led to so many problems in our forests today.

If you don’t know much about the 1910 fire and would like to learn, or if, like me, you are just a history junkie, The Big Burn is a book that I can recomend without reservation. The prose is highly crafted, the stories are irresistible and the research is impeccable. Pick up a copy today and let me know what you think.

Carbon hush money

Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS) is a recently discovered technology that will allow energy companies to reduce that large, uncomfortable bulge in your wallet. We have been burning coal for a couple of hundred years, but it seems that we have only recently realized that carbon-based fuels are dirty. They kill millions of people a year and are endangering the entire planet. According to large coal companies, the best way to deal with the problem of filthy, unhealthy power production is to give extremely large government subsidies to any industry that might kill us.

Coal companies believe that CCS technologies may, someday, perhaps, be able to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide that we pump into the atmosphere. But, it will require a large infusion of public money to test and prove the technology. They have yet to explain why, if this is really such a problem, they have failed for over a century to put any of their own money into the technology. Legislation currently moving through Congress will throw billions of taxpayer dollars at energy companies that they will, hopefully, liberally spend on public relations, building large test facilities and creating thousands of jobs, rather than on lobbying Congress against climate change legislation. Companies have spent billions in the last twenty years lobbying and crying about limiting greenhouse gases rather than investing in CCS or other cleaner technologies. They currently invest a pittance of their own money in the technology, hoping instead for a large endowment of public money.

The Department of Energy is pushing toward a goal of having 20 CCS demonstration projects up and running in the U.S. by 2010. Hundreds of projects are underway around the world. Optimistic projections think we may see CCS on a commercial scale by 2020. Skeptics think possibly 2030 or later. One DOE project in Mississippi has become the first in the nation to inject more than 1 million tons of the greenhouse gas into the ground. They hope to eventually reach a goal of sequestering 1.5 million tons. So, let’s see, we only produce a little over 6 billion tons of CO2 per year so, we only need another 6,000 such plants. Oh wait, I forgot, CCS technology eats up one-third of the power produced so, we will need to build another polluting power plant for every two that sequester their carbon. Most current sequestration projects pump their captured CO2 into depleted oil fields to enhance recovery of oil which is then burned to produce power, creating more greenhouse gases, pretty much a wash for the atmosphere.

CCS projects have proven to be extremely expensive even with massive public subsidies. Capital Power of Alberta, Canada dropped plans for a subsidized sequestration project last month due to cost. Two other planned Canadian projects would store about 2 million tons of Canada’s current 700 million ton output. There is much doubt whether CCS will ever be financially feasible even if the technology proves out.

The American Coal Energy and Security Act now in the House provides $10 billion to coal-fired electricity producers over the next ten years. $500 million of that goes for just “administrative expenses”. You can expect to see that charge on your electric bill. Bonus payments in the bill will “essentially cover the full capital costs of constructing a CCS-capable coal plant — about $3.5 billion each“. Plants will be paid $50-$90 per ton for the carbon sequestered. That means that the Mississippi plant would have earned around $70 million for its sequestered carbon dioxide. There are no comparable subsidies for cleaner technologies such as wind or solar. Big coal comes out the big winner along with state and local governments which will reap tax income from the demonstration plants and jobs. It appears that coal and energy companies will be big winners with CCS whether the technology ever proves out or not. Their coffers will be bloated with payoffs from public funds for the next couple of decades and all they have to do is keep their mouths shut about the government regulating greenhouse gases.

Otter Disaster

To those of you who wrote to the State Land Board to let them know how you feel about leasing the Otter Creek coal tracts: Thank you and take heart, I think they may be beginning to hear tiny voices in their ears. The board decided yesterday to delay a decision on leasing the state-owned tracts for at least another month. Don’t, however, begin to think that the board has seen the light. Remember, Governor “Coal Cowboy” Schweitzer has made using this coal a priority.

Mining more than a billion tons of coal in the Tongue River valley, destroying 10,000 acres of “trust” land, building a stupid, unneeded railroad to subsidize coal from Wyoming and possibly building an extremely dirty coal-to-liquids plant while we are trying to reduce greenhouse gases, remains one of the most ill-conceived plans yet devised for Montana. Arch Coal, the second largest provider of U.S. coal, right behind Peabody, has signed a lease agreement with Great Northern Properties to strip mine almost 10,000 acres in the checkerboard Otter Creek lands. They will need a lot of cooperation (read “tax dollars”) from Montana if they are to get that coal mined. A lot of hard pressure will be applied to the state to cooperate with Arch and to lease our state-owned coal. The decision to delay action was likely only made to give the Arch deal time to play out and give the board more time to listen to propaganda and deal-makers from leasing proponents.

The coal at Otter Creek is a high-sodium, high-pollution product that will only serve to displace coal currently produced by other Montana mines for power production in the northeastern states. The market for all coal is currently severely depressed. The only way to move the coal is to build a $1 billion ecological disaster called the Tongue River Railroad through the Tongue River Valley. The railroad is almost universally opposed by valley landowners. The current appraisal for the coal tracts is woefully out of date and according to a review by economist Tom Power, “is incomplete, lacks foundation, contains major conceptual and factual errors, and has been outdated by changed economic circumstances. It cannot be relied on as a basis to structure the leasing of the Otter Creek Tracts.” The Button Valley Bugle has covered this subject numerous times. 4&20 Blackbirds has had a couple of good recent articles as well, here and here.

For those and many other reasons, we cannot let up. We need to continue to let the members of the Land Board know that mining this coal at this time is a really dumb idea. Montana school trust lands generated over $70 million last year in support of the education of our children. How can we justify supporting our children by destroying thousands of acres of Montana to support a technology that kills millions of people every year? We must keep up the pressure. Please continue to call or write to members of the Land Board and let them know that a mortgage on our future and the future of our children is not worth a few million dollars.

Gov. Brian Schweitzer — (406) 444-3111, governor@mt.gov

Superintendent of Public Instruction, Denise Juneau — In-State Toll-Free 1-888-231-9393, Local (406) 444-3095 OPISupt@mt.gov

Attorney General Steve Bullock – (406) 444-2026 contact doj@mt.gov

State Auditor Monica Lindeen – (406) 444-2040 mlindeen@mt.gov

Secretary of State Linda McCulloch – (406) 444-2034 sos.mt.gov

Clean Coal, Hard Cash

AP released a brief article this morning outlining the real emphasis behind the push for “Clean Coal“. Governor Brian Schweitzer, in Bismarck on Tuesday for an energy seminar said, “clean coal technology could help generate billions of dollars for his state and North Dakota.“

Therein is revealed the real purpose behind our support for “Clean Coal“. It will generate billions of taxpayer dollars to fluff up the coffers of states and corporations by funding giagantic carbon sequestration pilot projects. Nobody really cares whether the technology is actually feasible or whether the projects eventually prove out. The significant achievement is that they will bring massive amounts of revenue to coal-producing states, thereby assuring continued support for climate legislation, or at least cooperative silence.

CCS questions remain

Climate legislation in both the Senate and House seek billions of dollars to fund carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) projects nationwide. Is this technology safe? Is it cost effective? Does it work? Does it even exist? These are the questions that we need to answer before we begin to just lob money at energy companies.

At a conference Monday at San Rafael’s Dominican University, former vice president Al Gore voiced skepticism about the technology.

“I hope that it works,” Gore said. “But it bears the burden of implausibility. If you’re the manager of a large coal plant, your business plan is to sell electricity. If you put carbon-capture sequestration technology there, it will take one third of the electricity you were selling. That’s going to make your business plan go haywire, and there’s a limit to how much taxpayers are going to want to pick up the tab.”

We are prepared to spend billions on a technology that has not been demonstrated to be feasible at the level it needs to be. Other nations have also jumped on the CCS bandwagon. Canada is spending billions on projects to demonstrate that the process works. China is pushing the technology because it has no choice, but they have serious doubts. They fear that the cost of reducing CO2 emissions may impact the economy, the expense of increased energy production to support CCS, and that the dangers posed by an accidental release of gas may be too high to make it feasible. Ma Yanhe, Director-General of the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology told Reuters,

“Apart from reducing greenhouse gas emissions, it is not making very significant contributions to sustainable development. The technology itself is also energy intensive and the significant energy consumption is quite worrisome. Finally, there is no reliable assessment methodology for the long-term environmental impact of this technology.”

Accidental release of captured gases, either from the underground storage locations or from the necessary thousands of miles of high-pressure pipelines could have disastrous consequences. The Guardian reported earlier this summer about the occurrence of a natural CO2 reservoir in Africa and it’s potential for disaster. The Bugle reported on the consequences of carbon storage in March and talked about another catastrophic natural release from Lake Nyos in Cameroon which killed 1,700 people and 3,500 head of livestock in 1986. We also reported last month about problems associated with nearby landowners who are not exactly thrilled about the prospect of storing massive amounts of deadly gas under their property in California. Associated press reports on another story today in the Netherlands about Dutch residents who have doubts about living atop a CO2 reservoir planned for an experimental CCS project.

The problems are real. The expense in both energy and taxpayer funding is real. People could die as a direct and indirect result of CCS technology. Never the less, these projects will move forward around the world and the Bugle will be there to keep you updated.

Beetle Battle

Coming soon, to a pine tree near you! He’s a tiny little feller, about the size of a grain of rice, but boy is he hungry. The Mountain Pine Beetle Dendroctonus ponderosae is a Rocky Mountain native and we had learned to live with occasional outbreaks. We are now in the middle of a full blown epidemic of beetles. Lots of the northwestern part of our state has so far been spared the catastrophic outbreaks of beetles seen in British Columbia and Colorado, or around Helena, but it doesn’t look like that will hold for much longer. Beetle infestation signs have begun to show up on the slopes around Missoula.

Amy Gannon says many trees on the Mount Jumbo saddle have pitch polka-dotting their trunks — a sign that they were trying to flush out the tiny beetles that bore into the tree. The trees still have green needles for now, but next year they’ll likely be covered with red needles and dead.

Driven by the climate change that some like to say is a hoax, beetle infestations have hit 22 million acres in British Columbia, “The pine beetle infestation is the first major climate change crisis in Canada,” Doug McArthur, a professor of public policy at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, told IPS. There are estimates that B.C. could loose 25% of it’s forests and that 80% of those dead trees won’t even be salvagable in ten years. In Colorado, beetle infestations have hit about 2 million acres of forest, doubling the amount of affected acreage in two years. Colorado is projecting that they will lose every lodgepole pine in the state in the next few years.

Those millions of acres of dead and dying pines are driving fire behavior that experts have never seen, even in Montana.

“We’re seeing fire behavior that surprised us,” said Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest Supervisor Dave Meyers. “We’re having more severe burning fires, they’re larger, they start sooner, and they go longer. We usually don’t see crown fires in late September.”

We can expect to see a more than 200% increase in the acreage burned each year due to climate change and this simple little pest. All we need to stop the infestation is a simple, normal winter. Temperatures of -30 for several days, or -40 for about twelve hours is all it takes to kill the beetles in the trees. We used to get a good cold spell along about the end of December or early January and that kept the little devils mostly in check. But, that is no longer the case. NOAA is predicting a drier and warmer winter driven by a Pacific El Nino again this year, so Missoula can expect to begin to see the slopes of Mt. Jumbo turning a pretty shade of red-brown by early summer next year.

And here’s one that hadn’t occurred to me. Large-scale power outages can be expected in the next few years due to the beetle epidemic. The nation’s power grid is also under indirect attack by itsy bitsy pine beetles. The largest power outage in American history, in 2003, left 50 million people without electricity for two days and cost 11 lives. The outage was due to untrimmed trees coming into contact with power lines in Ohio. A whole bunch of major western power lines now run through dead and dying forests in the West.

“Most of the major transmission lines for the Front Range cross the Continental Divide,” said Cal Wettstein, commander of the U.S. Forest Service’s Bark Beetle Incident Management Team. “There are three or four big, main lines and the majority of them go through some kind of beetle kill, so that’s the big concern.”

Emergency plans are now underway to allow power companies to clear large swaths of national forest land to avert failures due to beetle-killed trees. Just when you think you have this whole global warming thing figured out, nature throws you a curve ball.

Denny the Dodger

Back in July, Denny Rehberg signed the Let Freedom Ring, “Responsible Healthcare Reform Pledge“. He pledged to not vote to enact any health care reform legislation that he has not read personally in it’s entirity and that has not been available on the internet for at least 72 hours. The good news is, that Denny has read the entire 1,990 page House health care bill that was released on Thursday. Since he left Washington almost immediately for an “emergency meeting” in Billings yesterday, we can only assume that he read the bill on the plane.

We know that he has read the entire bill, because he released a line-by-line critique to the folks at the Billings meeting. He could not, of course, have such a depth of knowledge of the bill unless he had read the whole thing. The fact that his bullet points almost exactly match those of Rush Limbaugh was surely just a coincidence.

Yes, this is the same Denny Rehberg whose brilliant legislative career includes sponsoring 25 bills, zero of which have made it into law ranking him 37th out of 440 members according to OpenCongress. Three of the 118 bills that he co-sponsored have made it into law and he votes 90% of the time with Republicans. I can’t imagine where the other 10% goes. He still wants to take a 30-day vacation before even thinking about health care. I guess it gives him a headache.

I drilled a bit deeper at the OnTheIssues website. Here’s where your Congressman stands;

• Rated 0% by NARAL, indicating a pro-life voting record. (Dec 2003)
• Rated 100% by the NRLC, indicating a pro-life stance. (Dec 2006)
• Rated 21% by the ACLU, indicating an anti-civil rights voting record. (Dec 2002)
• Rated 0% by the HRC, indicating an anti-gay-rights stance. (Dec 2006)
• Rated 31% by the NAACP, indicating an anti-affirmative-action stance. (Dec 2006)
• Rated 25% by the NEA, indicating anti-public education votes. (Dec 2003)
• Rated 0% by the CAF, indicating opposition to energy independence. (Dec 2006)
• Rated 0% by the LCV, indicating anti-environment votes. (Dec 2003)
• Rated 11% by APHA, indicating a anti-public health voting record. (Dec 2003)
• Rated 7% by the AFL-CIO, indicating an anti-union voting record. (Dec 2003)
• Rated 10% by the ARA, indicating an anti-senior voting record. (Dec 2003)
• Rated 0% by the AU, indicating opposition to church-state separation. (Dec 2006)

That’s pretty much Denny in a nutshell. We report, you vote.

Temperature tantrum

I see that it was snowing in Colorado and Wyoming yesterday. Imagine that, snow in October. So, there you have it, global warming is a fake. That’s about as deep into the data as the folks who denounce climate change like to go.

One of the favorite ploys of climate change deniers is to claim that the world has actually been cooling since 1998 and therefore global warming is a worldwide conspiratorial hoax by nearly every prominent science organization. Maybe the Associated Press had a slow day, but they decided to check out the cooling claim. They presented global temperature data to four respected statisticians and asked them to look for trends in the data. The statisticians were not told what the data represented.

The scientists found that, contrary to claims by skeptics, there really is no cooling going on. In fact, the opposite is still true. NOAA said that “The last 10 years are the warmest 10-year period of the modern record.” “Of the 10 hottest years recorded by NOAA, eight have occurred since 2000,” So, where does the cooling myth come from? Well, it seems that it depends on which data set you use and what period you choose to analyze. 1998 was one of the hottest years on record. If you choose 1998 as your starting year, the data can be cherry-picked to give the impression of a decade of cooling. If however, you choose to start in 1997, or 1999, the trend disappears. The “apparent cooling” is all part of the normal ups and downs of the climatic cycle. The modern data, running back as far as 1880 show continuing warming. Other studies by respected scientists have come to the same conclusion. The fairy story of global cooling is just a lame attempt by corporate-sponsored hacks to throw a wrench in the upcoming Copenhagen climate conference. It doesn’t represent real science in any responsible way.

Last month, the AP reported that the world’s oceans are also setting temperature records. In July, the waters off the U.S. east coast were the warmest that has been recorded in the 130 years of record keeping. Believe what you want to believe, but be sure that if you are going to make up your own science, you have the data to back it up. That should be be the end of the shivering decade saga, but I think we all know that ain’t going to happen. Kooks don’t need real data or accurate science to back up their claims. The rest of us do.

NUMBY Californians

Here’s another reason why carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) is not really such a good idea. The basic idea is that we will just capture all the CO2 produced by coal-fired power plants, pump it under high pressure across the country and shove it thousands of feet underground where it will stay for infinity and not bother nobody. The concept sounds cool, but it has actually never been proven on an industrial scale and even if it does prove out, it will be decades before the technology begins to ramp up.

In California, a consortium of government agencies and energy companies funded by the DOE to study sequestration called the West Coast Regional Carbon Sequestration Partnership (WESTCARB) has been looking for a good test site in which to park a few thousand tons of CO2 for some time. So far, not much luck. A good article in the latest Mother Jones, Not Under My Backyard, points out that Californians haven’t exactly been flocking to the idea. In the small town of Thornton, the mayor said “Even though they said there was no potential danger, I don’t think the community believed that 100 percent.” An advocate for the Union of Concerned Scientists talked about the possibility that the CO2 may not stay exactly where it is put and there is a possibility of groundwater pollution. “It’s tricky to know what conduits exist underground,” she says. “Those could be a potential pathway for the CO₂ or the other minerals to leach out.” Thornton said, No Thanks.

It seems that so far, WESTCARB isn’t having a lot of luck convincing California residents that they are being told the entire story about CCS. In their latest foray at Birds Landing, an unincorporated community of 130 in Solano County, a nearby city councilman told WESTCARB, “You are telling me about how this might benefit WESTCARB, but you aren’t telling me anything about how this might harm anyone living in the area.“

Due to the immense amount of time that the carbon will have to stay exactly where it is put, there is no way to assure residents that there won’t be problems sometime in the future. And that, rightly, has the people who have to live on top of the toxic reservoir a bit worried. About 25 possible sequestration sites have been identified nationwide. A DOE study found that 11 of 19 possible sites “reported significant legal obstacles“. I know it sounds awfully narrow minded to be against having a high-pressure poison pumped or trucked through your community and stored underneath your house, but it amounts to just one more in a long list of reasons why the concept of Clean Coal and CCS in particular, is a really dumb idea.