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Mountaintop removal eliminates the mountain and fills the valley below

I have been waiting for the documentary “The Last Mountain” to be released to my  Netflix streaming queue for sometime and then it suddenly showed up, so I watched it a few nights ago. Directed by Bill Haney, it tells the gripping story of the fight to keep Coal River Mountain West Virginia from being destroyed by the Massey Energy  Company.  The residents of Coal River Valley have been threatened for years by mountain top removal in a region of the state that has breath-taking, tree-covered hills and valleys; this region however has been progressively destroyed by coal mining through the technique of  mountaintop removal, based on massive, mechanized  machinery and explosives. Although Robert Kennedy played a major role as an activist and adviser in the documentary, and clearly adds a sense of national urgency to the issues addressed, the story is also about how local residents of Coal River Valley got together and formed an activist resistance to the Massey Coal Company’s plan to remove Coal River Mountain, a mountain that serves as a watershed for residents of the valleys below.  Many other mountains in the region have already been destroyed by coal mining, such that Coal River Mountain was and is the “last mountain standing”  of significance for the region. The removal of this mountain will destroy the water system of people living downstream and increase the severity of flooding, two well-known, obligatory features of mountaintop removal.  Many residents believe that Massey Coal wants to depopulate the Coal River Valley and eliminate downstream community occupancy, to give them more space for strip-mining. It is a very ugly process.

While the Obama administration has been more sensitive to the destruction of the water supply by mountaintop coal mining and violations of environmental laws, the original permits to remove Coal River Mountain were given during the Bush administration and Massey Coal has proceeded to execute its march towards mountain destruction. However, in a somewhat duplicitous manner, the Obama administration continues to issue permits for more mountaintop removal in the region. An interesting feature of this controversy was revealed in the documentary based on studies  that raise the feasibility of putting windmill generators across the top of Coal River Mountain. Those who have studied this suggest that wind power generation would produce more jobs and give the neighboring communities more long-term income through power generation and improvements in the tax base, when compared to the resources generated by the Massey mountaintop removal project,  which  of course will end at some time in the future. The demonstrations, sit-ins and tree sitting by environmentalists and residents are greeted with hostility by the miners who still have jobs working for Massey Coal. Oddly enough, I didn’t see many of the mountain top removal defenders (50 percent of our electricity comes from coal) argue that the future of the industry depends on the development of new clean coal technologies, none of which were on display or even discussed. Many coal-based power plants claim that they are ready for “carbon-capture” technology when it becomes available. But that possibility is very remote because once in service, the public will not tolerate retrofitting for carbon-capture, even if the technique becomes feasible, as it would add enormous costs to existing energy production. If carbon-capture or some similar clean coal technology ever comes along, it is likely to increase the cost of coal-based power plants to a prohibitively high level. Coal is currently the worst source of air pollution and the long list of its pollution offenses  goes beyond carbon dioxide and includes such things as mercury contamination, which accounts for warnings we get about eating fish too often because of their high mercury content. Mercury is toxic to the brain and impacts on brain development. It might be that Republicans have been eating too much fish.

Robert Kennedy is articulate in pointing out that the impact of Massey Coal has been to increase the poverty of the region, first by destroying the unions in the 1980s (companies close mines, send unionized workers home and then reopened the mines with non-union miners, complete with reduced salary and benefits) and second, by reducing the labor force through automation and modernization of equipment and techniques: strip mining is replacing deep hole mining, with a reduction in the labor force needed.  But if the true cost of coal mining was reflected in the price of coal, including the serious health care costs and safety issues, the cost of this form of energy would be prohibitively expensive. We are not just trapped by the history of the region as a long-standing coal-mining center, but also by the powerful lobbying interests of coal mining and transportation (trains) that thrive on their operations in West Virginia and other coal-intensive states.  One can add that Wall Street has billions invested in these companies because they are profitable and seem to be free from serious regulatory control. Add to that formula the corrupt organization of the state’s environmental protection agency, which allows coal companies to violate water and air quality standards without fines, and you have an updated version of “Love Canal.”

The environmental damage does not stop with a disappearing mountain top. The heavy coal mining leads to toxic waste sites in the mountain regions above the valleys, created from the water used to wash the coal before it is shipped and these sites leak and pollute the water supply downstream, carrying highly toxic material.  Several websites have been put up to monitor the mining operation, but the state and Federal Government seem to collude as obstacles for better environmental regulation. The trouble is that while wind energy might be successful for the future of local inhabitants, how will the energy needs of others be met who receive the coal over long distance railroad shipments? You have to decommission these coal plants one at a time, when you have a suitable alternative and until that can be achieved, the forces promoting mountaintop removal will keep going with few obstacles in sight that can stop them. If you had only two solutions to our energy needs, nuclear power and coal mining, the preferred choice would be obvious.  The solution at hand is to build a new, modern transcontinental power grid that collects electricity from all forms of power generated in different ways and distribute that power efficiently to homes and businesses. This is an infrastructure issue. Yes, it would be better to replace coal-fired power plants with natural gas in the short-run, and it seems obvious that the wind turbine option for the people of Coal River Valley makes far more economic and environmental sense, but how to resolve the challenges of implementing this new technology in place of coal is something we can only achieve through the force of a national government, not a state government, which, in the case of West Virginia seems hopelessly corrupt and entirely devoted to the private, rather than the public interest.

RFM

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Fig. 1 Planet Earth (NASA)

Every educated person on the planet has heard about the threats to human existence imposed by Global Warming. Yet, few of us are knowledgeable enough to explain the basic mechanisms that determine our climate, especially when talking to those among whom are doubting members of the choir. Understanding the essential elements of Global Warming requires effort and an intellectual expenditure, but you can converse intelligently on the subject, while stopping short of explaining the situation on the basis of a thermodynamic theory of equilibrium. Besides, the earth’s climate has never truly been in any form of equilibrium–some positive or negative driving force or energy imbalance has always been trying to change our climate, though, until now, such changes have taken place over millenia, not over the two hundred plus years of the industrial revolution.  Our climate has always been changing, even though the time constants for change are way beyond a human lifetime, and lie properly scaled and recorded within the geological and paleoclimatological record, which gives up its secrets slowly. But once properly deciphered that record reveals a surprisingly coherent history for those willing to put the effort into interpreting the scrolls, or to be more accurate, deciphering the core drillings of oceans and glaciers. Of course, we don’t yet have a complete story. There are large gaps in our knowledge, but we know enough already to be mesmerized by our planetary history and the forces that have shaped our climate. And we should know enough to be alarmed and very wary about our future.

It is now clear that never before in our climate history have we witnessed the kind of experiment now underway–the forcing of our planet to go through something it has never experienced before–a sharp, man-made increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide that is now taking place and pushing us towards a climatological precipice that we might not be able to escape. But if we act quickly, this experiment is still under our control, depending on whether we can muster the political will to curb our use of fossil fuels and restore energy balance to keep the planet as it was, with atmospheric carbon dioxide at 350 parts per million (ppm) or less ; it is now at 387 ppm and rising at a rate of about 2 ppm per year. The alternative is that we run the risk of higher levels of carbon dioxide that will trigger the melting of Greenland and the polar ice caps and eventually raise our sea level by 270 feet! We are probably not at risk for a sea level increase of that magnitude during this century, but we do run the risk of having this kind of sea level rise take place, and once it starts, there will be nothing we can do to stop it. Not only will this massive ice melting proceed out of our control, it will cool the local regions where the melting takes place, impact our weather systems and change the driving forces for oceanic currents. The emergency we must address now has been created by the fact that the carbon dioxide we have put into the atmosphere has a very long half-life and its actions on our planet will be with us for a  very long time. Couple this reality to the fact that we are already seeing weather patterns that reflect Global Warming and you inescapably conclude that our short-term climate does not look good–it will inescapably be more violent. But, we can still do something for the long-term, by acting soon and now is not too early. There is little doubt that if we continue to burn fossil fuels through a business-as-usual mode, our planet will be markedly different and our planetary future will be seriously in doubt. In many ways, that’s the shock–not only that the climate is never in equilibrium, but that it is also super-sensitive to the very fuels we have chosen as our cheapest form of energy. For too long we have assumed constancy in our climate lives: that luxury has now gone, at least the assumption part of it.

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For what it’s worth, one of the lead stories carried on the front page of the New York Times this morning, describes how the Chinese have surpassed the Americans as owners of the world’s fastest supercomputer. The Tianhe-1A has 1.4 times the horsepower of the current top U.S. supercomputer which resides at a national laboratory in Tennessee. What makes this computer much faster than the top American computers is how they integrate and link many different computers into a workable array, each member of which is assigned a task in a multitasking environment. Part of this is hardware and part is software. The current Chinese champion has succeeded in putting together Intel and Nvidia chips in a new way that provides about twice the communication speed of their American competitors. This is not the first time American supercomputers have lost out in the speed contest. In 2002 Japan announced a supercomputer that was faster than the top 20 American machines. But the U.S. Government staged a comeback and regained the crown in 2004 and has kept it until the new Chinese machine was announced. Their machine is housed in the National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin. A spokesperson for the Chinese commented that up until now, they have relied on American computer chips to fabricate their new champion, but in the near future, they promise to build their own chips, which should begin to appear within the next year or two.

Supercomputers in America are now commonplace and exist in many universities and national laboratories. The supercomputers we have at the University of Minnesota are housed in a special Supercomputer Institute and can be accessed by faculty and large corporations. I have used our supercomputers several times to carry out computations related to modeling nerve cells and my colleague uses it continuously for that purpose. However, the improved speed and design of desktop machines and innovations in software, have allowed many intense modeling applications to be successfully carried out on personal computers. Fast graphics processing cards also provide access to things such as 3D visualization, something that was stimulated by the advances in the 3D gaming industry (I happened to visit the Seattle Convention Center earlier this year, when Microsoft was having a meeting for their XBox gaming machine programmers. All the attendees looked like high school kids–they are the ones writing the gaming software–not all of them are nerds).  Then too, software tools allow individuals to form computational clusters, so that you could donate your machine or use other non-campus machines to carry out special parallel processing tasks that rival in speed and complexity what a supercomputer can do. Such massively parallel systems are not housed in a single building, but made up of personal computers distributed throughout the country or the world. The internationalization of supercomputing is upon us and complex tasks can now be done through that route–you just have to spread the word!

Undoubtedly, American computer engineers are going to take the challenge from the Chinese success very seriously and new resources will flow to make American supercomputers the fastest on the planet once again. This is easy to justify, as models of the environment centered around global climate change require very fast machines and lots of CPU time. I doubt however that this single effort will generate what the country really needs–a well focused stimulus package that starts a new economy and educates, at low cost, the students we will need to generate new jobs and keep them here in America. The Tea Party people that are going to the polls this November with outrage as a motivating factor, should refocus their anger towards the people who allowed our manufacturing base and their jobs to dwindle and our future to appear more cloudy. It was a combination of the Cold War trade policies (in which we allowed countries like Japan to access our markets to keep them in our global hegemonic column) and the Republican anti-labor movement, which delighted in destroying American companies that were unionized, sending them off to China. As a result, the Chinese can not only fund their own march to supercomputer supremacy, but in the process fund the silly, but disastrous wars we fight for reasons that no one can quite remember–the wars are simply too long for secure institutional memory. If you remember, it was that way in Vietnam, though on  a far shorter time scale–first we thought we were fighting the Russians, then the Chinese and finally it was the domino theory proposed in such a way that we were simply fighting evil.

For economic comparisons, we should all watch the British, who have embarked on an anti-Keynesian economic experiment along the lines that Republicans over hear are talking about–severely cutting spending. But we already tried that–when Hoover was President and it predictably worsened the economy and deepened the depression.  It’s as simple as this: with high unemployment, reduced Federal spending causes more unemployment and reduces the tax revenues, causing more spending cuts in a downward spiral that doesn’t end until massive unemployment and hardship arrives on our doorstep. It is true that Obama didn’t do a lot of things quite right, with perhaps the lack of “Medicare for all” as the most egregious omission in the healthcare bill. But his errors, which can always be corrected and improved upon,  pale in comparison to the disastrous Republican strategy, should they be able to implement it. You see, the constituencies for the Republicans are already making money and what they don’t want to get stuck with is helping to payback for the damage they caused in the first place. If you don’t believe me, listen to Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz. His comment is that anyone who doesn’t understand this simple principle doesn’t know the first thing about economics. Dreaming in America continues, with or without medication. Globalization of the American casino, freemarket economy is anti-labor and anti-middle class. Vote accordingly.

RFM

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