The war on coal, harvested off the shores of 19th century England to power the industrial revolution under the soot blanketed skies of London of Mary Poppins and her coterie of chimney sweepers, has become a necessary compromise in the evolution of energy supply from wood by denudation.
The consumption of coal has taken the treasure hunt, as Barbara Freese documents in her book Coal: A Human History, from the banks of Thames to the mines and mountain tops of West Virginia, from picking it off the surface to the depths of the pits and highs on the earth. So it has been with oil in Pennsylvania and all else humanity needs from the earth to feed the modern paradigm of the industrial way of life.
Cherry Tree Lanes have since become brighter during the day because Thomas Edison’s and Nikola Tesla’s centralized electricity situated away from where most people live replaced coal burning which was erstwhile interspersed with population centers. Concentrated soot and ash discarded in landfills and in the atmosphere, together with the noxious gases, is, for the purposes of make-belief, non-existent because it is not seen, its latent effects dispersed over intergenerational time.
Electricity made from coal in the United States is sold to consumers for about $0.07 in Texas and approximately double that elsewhere in the country where the regulatory costs are higher. The country is powered by coal for its day-to-day existence.
There are still plenty of fossil fuels, sources of energy made from life long dead and cooked under the ground, to last humanity at least a century at the current rates of use if only we can deal with the toxicity of having burned them and burning them. The most challenging of them all is coal because of tons of residual ash and carbon dioxide.
Among all the energy alternatives whose research the US Department of Energy funds since the days of the Manhattan Project and more coherently since former president Jimmy Carter made energy into a department after Nixon and Ford’s Project Independence in 1973 (and because Carter liked solar panels in the White House), the most promising is the FutureGen Initiative of zero emissions coal burning plants through carbon sequestration.
Former Vice President and Nobel Peace Laureate Al Gore, a man disgruntled from burning more oil than he wished when he resided in the Naval Observatory in Washington in the ‘90s because oil prices were cheaper than bottled water during the presidency of his boss Bill Clinton, regarded by many (including myself) as the most gifted politician in a generation, has made it his life’s mission to understand and transform the technologies that make our way of life feasible in his multimedia book “Our Choice,” the bookend on the other side to his first book “Earth In The Balance” when he was a United States Senator from Tennessee.
In the book, Gore discusses the importance of carbon for soil fertility and agricultural production in various parts of the world from the American prairie to the Savanna of sub-Saharan Africa, citing Hans van Ginkel, a former Under Secretary-General of the United Nations. The need for electricity for economic development and food for health and poverty reduction anywhere in the world cannot be any more overstated.
In the immediate term, the recycling of carbon dioxide captured from the cheaper coal burning plants in countries around the world into their soils to raise fertility for climate-smart agriculture by deploying FutureGen is optimal energy policy for agricultural and industry.