The War On Coal

By Mike Roselle

He looked across the restaurant and saw everyone stuffing their faces with pasta and drinking wine. "And everyone's kind of just sitting there doing it," he said.

Which is really sort of extraordinary, he said. The country is at war. People are fighting at this very moment. Don't these people know what's going on? Don't they care?

No, he decided. They have no appreciation for their easy, gluttonous lives and don't deserve the freedom, prosperity and contentment he was fighting to protect.

He wanted to yell, "You don't know what you have! You don't appreciate it! You don't care!"

But he didn't. He kept his mouth shut. He was only home on leave. Soon, he would be going back to the war.

-Army Capt. Tyler McIntyre quoted in Washington Post.com in an article written by Christian Davenport.

Captain McIntyre was of course talking about the war in Iraq, but it is hard for me to read these words without thinking about the war against nature and the fight over global warming. The soldiers of this country are ready to lay their lives on the line. And for what?  So people can go about their lives without a care for anybody or anything else but their immediate families. Yet these soldiers continue to fight.

The Americans who lived through World War II have been called our greatest generation. I can’t say for sure if this is true, but it is true that the amount of damage done to the Earth’s natural diversity since the war ended by this group of Americans is perhaps our greatest tragedy. The WWII generation went from being highly motivated, patriotic citizens working and sacrificing together to fight an evil empire in to being one of the most self-absorbed, materialistic and uninvolved generations ever. In doing so, they amassed one of the greatest fortunes in history, exceed only by their progeny, the baby boomers, who have reaped the rewards of their parents sacrifice but so far seem unwilling to make any sacrifices themselves.

In the midst of the ongoing crisis of extinction and global warming a great generation is now badly needed, and even more urgently needed is a society willing to make sacrifices for the future generations to come. When I hear liberals defend their use of an SUV because they cannot be expected get four children in a Pirus, I understand why the coal industry is so confident that they can double the amount of coal they mine and burn for electricity. I understand why they could allow the country to go to war. The only Americans that will make a sacrifice for the future are in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the soldiers returning home from this war are not even sure it was worth the effort.

During WWII, gas was rationed. The U.S. had plenty of gas, but the military was critically low on stocks of rubber. Rationing gas would lessen the amount of miles civilians drove and the reduced tire wear would conserve a large amount of rubber. Scrap rubber was also recycled by the trainload as citizens brought rubber items both old and new to collection centers. There were many other material comforts that Americans were asked to do without. Even things like coffee and sugar were scarce, and victory gardens replaced lawns. Americans were willing to make sacrifices to support the soldiers in the field.

There are lots of ways we Americans could contribute to the current environmental war effort. The first step is to acknowledge that we are in the moral equivalent of war; a fight for our own survival. We could cut our energy use in half and still be the most pampered generation on the planet. We have to lose our smug sense of entitlement. We need to stop using energy as a way to demonstrate our social status. I cannot believe we Americans really think that we have earned the right to this orgy of gluttony.

Today Americans don’t trust anyone or anything unless it has been properly branded. Starbucks is trusted to give you a good cup of coffee; McDonalds is trusted to deliver a consistently bland meat sandwich and Levi’s will make your ass look good. These brands don’t ask you to sacrifice anything. Yet we are asking people who labor in the plantations and factories where these products are made and asking them to make sacrifices we would never make, just to save a quarter or a dollar on something we don’t need.

The U.S., India and China are at last count, planning on building 850 new coal-fired power plants. Canada is adding at least a dozen more, and other countries with coal deposits are all planning to join the party. This is why I have no time for wind-energy hucksters who turn their heads the other way and refuse to acknowledge that these new electric generators will smash any hope of complying even with the ridiculously modest carbon reduction goals of the Kyoto Convention. Al Gore has said that Global Warming is a moral issue about the survival of human civilization. If this is true, and I believe it is, then building these plants is nothing less than criminal. They simply must be stopped.

The mainstream environmental groups have dropped the ball on this issue, and in doing so they are serving as lapdogs to the coal industry. They are not proposing any actions that will approach the level of urgency that this issue requires. Sure, here in the USA we need to ride our bicycles, change our light bulbs use energy more efficiently. This is what the rest of the world is already doing. But we cannot allow the coal-fired plants we now have to continue to operate, much less add a thousand more new ones. Some of these plants will cost over a billion dollars each. That is money that can go into proven technology that can reduce overall energy consumption, allowing old power plants to be decommissioned. And yes, it can go to wind and solar, again, as a goal towards getting the older generators off line as quickly as possible, not as a way of meeting our ever expanding demand for energy.

Americans must simply use less energy, a lot less energy. Cutting our consumption in half would not create any hardships for most of us. Keeping our consumption any where near the current level is simply irresponsible, selfish, self-destructive and in violation of the basic human rights of the rest of the world. If the world has to except lower carbon emission levels, the U.S. will have to go first. We need to demonstrate that we are serious. How can we even pretend to be serious when we are planning to use more gas, oil and coal, when the only sacrifices we are willing to make are those that come with no pain? Certainly lowering emissions in poor countries would cause pain. Ending oil exports will cause pain to people in countries like Mexico, Nigeria and Venezuela. But here in the US, we are planning a pain free zone.

We seem willing to spend billions of dollars on new wind farms so we can avoid pain and feel clean, but we still apparently plan to buy all the fossil fuel that the Earth can produce until it is all gone. As Teddy Goldsmith, the esteemed editor of the Ecologist, said back in 1970, energy will never be the limiting factor in development. The limiting factor will be the Earth’s ability to deal with the consequences of energy development, and this will primarily be the effect on the atmosphere from carbon dioxide. But wherever this energy comes from, or what type of energy it is, it is the development itself that has limitations, especially if that development comes with increases in the human population and the per capita consumption of natural resources.

Yet evidently for groups like the Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council, this is acceptable. Their members are doing very well in the midst of this crisis and there is no need to rock the boat. They seem to be saying that as long as we are peddling light bulbs, hybrid cars and windmills we are safe. We can continue to walk the halls of Washington hoping against hope for a piece of global warming legislation that might make it by the captains of industry and their legions of oil and coal corrupted politicians. To maintain their credibility with decision makers, they support positions that they know to be inadequate to the task. They are living in a make believe world where they are both leading the fight against global warming and cashing a pretty good paycheck in the process. They pedal hope but are themselves hopeless.

Americans will need to make an end run around the politicians in Washington D.C. and the Big Green environmental groups if they want to win. We cannot accept their version of reality. We need to have faith in the American people and tell them the truth. To assume that unchecked growth and development can occur alongside a slow orderly switch to viable energy alternatives is naive at and irresponsible at best, and at worst it is complicit in a crime that will make the atrocities of the last Great World War look like a picnic. We need the combination of the Manhattan Project, the Marshall Plan and the NASA mission to fly to the Moon, not just better mileage on a few new car models.

The greatest generation needs to step forward now. I don’t know which generation that will be, but this is something we cannot leave for the younger ones to solve. They did not create this problem, we did. The older generation in this country is sitting on a considerable amount of the Earth’s wealth and power. It is time they used this to put forward a truly radical agenda, a shift in our energy consumption. We need leadership from the large environmental groups and they are not providing it. We need to pressure them to take a strong position on carbon emissions and energy consumption, and ask American’s to make a sacrifice.

We need to stop burning coal.

Mike Roselle dispatches for Lowbagger.org.