CORPORATE CRIME REPORTER
Coal
Operating in Soviet Style Economy
20 Corporate Crime Reporter 29(3), July 14, 2006
Think of the cost of coal to America.
More than 100,000 miners dead in the mines.
Another 100,000 dead from black lung disease.
And 24,000 a year dead from diseases caused by the air pollution that results
from burning coal to make electricity.
And then of course, the big kahuna – global warming.
Jeff Goodell says that you could buy every American a Prius – or a bicycle
for that matter – and it wouldn’t make a dent with regard to global
warming.
“As long as we continue to make electricity with coal, it doesn’t
matter what we are riding to get around,” he said.
“One coal plant I looked at in Illinois that is going up soon will emit
twice as much carbon dioxide as every car built by Ford Motor Company this year,”
Goodell told Corporate Crime Reporter. “That gives you a sense
what an enormous amount of carbon dioxide these coal plants put out. And you
have China building a new coal plant every week. When you are talking about
global warming, coal is the problem.”
And there are 130 new coal plants coming on line in the United States.
Goodell is the author of the new book – Big
Coal: The Dirty Secret Behind America’s Energy Future (Houghton Mifflin,
2006).
Goodell says that the coal industry has a hammerlock on energy policy in this
country, but that the reality of global warming will eventually break its grip.
And he says that if you factored in the true cost of coal to Americans, if you
put a price on carbon, wind and solar energy would be cheaper than coal. And
we’d be on our way to a solar economy.
“Coal is not an industry that has thrived within a market system,”
Goodell said. “It is the most protected, most Soviet-style industry in
America. It thrives because all of the high costs of burning coal – from
the 24,000 deaths that result from coal fired power plants, to the mercury poisoning
of America’s lakes and rivers, to the big problem of global warming and
the destabilizing of the climate – have been offloaded, without the coal
industry having to pay for it, because of their political power.”
If you had tough laws and law enforcement on air pollution alone, things would
change dramatically.
“Right now, power from a coal plant is about $30 a megawatt,” Goodell
says. “If you factored in just the price of air pollution from coal, it
would add between $10 and $30 per megawatt. It could as much as double the price
of coal from a coal plant. If you factored those costs in, then wind would be
cheaper than coal. And nobody would be throwing up coal plants, because they
would be too expensive. But all of those costs are offloaded.”
[For a complete transcript of the Interview with Jeff Goodell, see 20 Corporate
Crime Reporter 29(9), July 17, 2006, print edition
only]
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