A Geologist's Take on Trump's Energy Plan

A Geologist’s Take on Trump's Energy Plan

What’s so Great about Coal?

Having worked as a geologist in exploration, mining, mine remediation, environmental remediation, nuclear waste management, and in coal and oil and gas, and with a husband who works in renewable energy, I feel we have some insight into Trump's new energy policy, heavy on amping up the oil and gas industry and pushing coal mining. We expect he wants to dump millions of dollars into mining, transportation and processing infrastructure with no environmental regulation or oversight to retrofit older coal fired power plants with newer air quality control technology and we don't really understand why he wants to set us back 50 years in technology. My concern with his Trillion dollar infrastructure “plan” about which we have very few details, is it will end up in wasteful, short term gain, long term destructive coal projects. Ok, so a few thousand jobs are created...in um, the dirtiest industry going? Coal mining, because it is often cheapest to remove mountaintops to get to the coal seams below, is heinously destructive to the environment (http://www.plunderingappalachia.org/) and frankly, not a job I'd want my husband to have if I wanted him to make it to his sons' graduations. Here is a recent article on advanced incurable black lung cases surging.

http://www.npr.org/2016/12/15/505577680/advanced-black-lung-cases-surge-in-appalachia.

I learned, working in mining, that mining engineers are tickled when they see a giant open pit with orderly cut benches and underground tunnels they designed. They might even show you a satellite image where you can see the pit from outer space, and I can see how the symmetry and engineering feat can seem glamorous. I don't, however, think the creatures of the forest or the burrowing owls are really into it, nor the miners who end up with incurable Black Lung. For all, any large mining project is a huge environmental footprint. Particularly when using a strip mining or mountaintop removal technique, which basically looks like the end of the Lorax when all the trees and living things are gone.

So really Trump's promise to America should read: "providing jobs that will pay pretty good and your hubby might even make it to 43, but that's ok because it's not going to be a very nice place to live anyway after the last mountain tops are removed.”

So let's be real. Trump is not concerned with whether the common man eats cabbage and carrots or upgrades to steak. He's concerned about big business profits, and in this industry, big business means ginormous mess. What follows is he's nominated a guy to run the EPA who thinks it should be eradicated. And that leaves us with a situation in 4 or 8 and surely 100 years from now where there is NO funding to clean up the ginormous mess. He doesn't live in those beautiful hills where those miners live, so he doesn't care. So, very quickly Appalachia and all its critters will lose the last of their few unmolested mountains. And people around there have become used to seeing flat mountains devoid of life, so it won't be such a dramatic change for them, but as natural habitat is decreased, we knock out keystone species like bees and frogs, on which the whole system relies and now with no pollinators, we have less food, and it's looking more and more dire for us at the top of the food chain. But now we're getting too scienc-y, and then I'll start talking about climate change and ravaging beetle populations and decreasing species diversity, and who even really knows if all that stuff is real? It is sneakily suspicious though, that the biggest deniers of climate change are those who stand to benefit greatly from de-regulation of big environmentally dirty businesses. Meanwhile, those who spend lifetimes traipsing around on glaciers at either end of the earth, carefully measuring them and taking ice cores to compare thousands of years passed and then watching them melt increasingly rapidly, are judged to be hyperbolic. And what do they stand to gain? A research paper publication? That hardly compares with the profits from millions of barrels of oil.

My dad got annoyed with me once for referring to all minerals and potentially mineable reserves as "resources". He said "Doesn't the earth in its natural state have value without extracting something from it?" Well, the Koch brothers would answer no, unless there's a wildlife preserve you can smack on top of it and make people pay to shoot stuff. But it begs the question, why is real estate more expensive closer to parks? I'm sure the Trump tower has a nice view of one. Why do people want to have work/live communities where they can bike to the store, or walk to a playground? The natural environment feeds our souls. It is where we came from and to where we will return. So why has “environmentalist” become such a bad word if it's in our best interest to have access to clean air, water, and natural landscapes? A study was conducted where trees were added to urban environments along with bird sounds. The more exposure people had to them, the happier they reported being. Why is it only the Koch brothers get to have their 50 acres of unadulterated land in Aspen while the rest of us have to skirt around it and wonder if our drinking water is safe? Some of us even pay taxes that are meant to go to infrastructure and social services. If you don't have clean water, it's really irrelevant whether you can turn your lights on, so back to my beef with coal.

We already have excellent technologies developed for solar, electric and wind power and we are developing technology for bio-fuels. It seems their major offense is that Renewables don't make the one percent of one percent enough money. That shouldn't be offensive to the rest of us, since Renewables are known to provide more jobs per unit of energy produced than Fossil Fuels. What is offensive, given that California trees are dying by the truckload due to drought, beetle kill, and some of the worst air quality in the San Joaquin Valley, mainly from car exhaust and agriculture is we keep seeing energy infrastructure development favor oil usage and coal. In the 30s, GM decided to convert rail cars to busses. We've seen this around the same time when the California statewide bicycle committee removed most bike lanes stating it was for safety, when it was really just to make room for more roads. LA once had beautiful biking infrastructure, and it is now a veritable parking lot of cars. Here are pictures of the Beautiful raised bikeways people used to commute, instead of sitting on their tushes as they do now breathing exhaust and eating Cheetos.

https://www.kcet.org/shows/lost-la/a-brief-history-of-bicycles-in-the-los-angeles-area

There is no "clean energy". Even with wind power, you have to mine the metals to make the turbines. In mining for many metals, often 98% of the material extracted becomes waste and a nasty contaminant because after the rock has been crushed to remove the target mineral, runoff of sulfide minerals and heavy metals released from the crushed rock become contaminants. Mining companies could recycle and re-crush old tailings for new resources, and they sometimes do, but the commodities prices have to be right, and often by the time they get the permitting and infrastructure in place, the resource is no longer profitable to extract as world markets change. Miners could also develop more processing streams to extract more minerals, as some require different crushing grades or chemical treatments, but it's rarely profitable to develop more than a couple of processing streams. RARE earth elements, however, we need and we don't really optimize. We are reliant on China for these, though some occur here. It turns out they are really important for phones, and iPads and computers and such, and I think most people would choose those over leaving a few extra lights on. So last I heard, we could certainly use a little more of those stateside. But I digress. Back to the dirty business of coal.

Even with expensive clay and material lined containment ponds for waste, which are only an advent of environmental regulations in the late 70's, spills happen. For decades before regulations, they just dumped sulfuric heavy-metal-laden contaminating tailings directly into rivers, lakes, and oceans. They knew in the late 1800s that metals poisoning messes your brain up, as they discovered all over the world in the hat making business, which used mercury to treat the felts, leading to Mad Hatters disease. But mercury was used until 1941 even in Danbury, Connecticut near where my father's family is from. Local hat makers were known to have the "Danbury shakes".

Then there was the historic case of methyl-mercury poisoning in Japan in 1956 from waste water from a chemical plant being dumped directly into the fishing bay from 1932 to 1968. Thousands of people died spanning 40 years as the mercury became concentrated as it worked its way up the food chain. But let's not get too bogged down in facts. With the lifting of environmental regulations here, we will soon learn plenty about metals poisoning.

One recent case here was a massive dam break at the Tennessee Valley Authority 2008 Kingston Fossil Plant dyke breach which spilled 5.4 million cubic yards of coal ash (a slurry of metal laden waste, a byproduct of coal combustion) into the Emory and Clinch Rivers and smothered about 300 acres of land. More coal ash spilled at Kingston than oil from the Deepwater Horizon accident in the Gulf of Mexico two years later, considered one of America's top ten environmental disasters. I am intimately familiar with the Tennessee case because my husband’s family owned a farm on the contaminated land. While hundreds of farms were destroyed, including theirs, their animals also poisoned, coal ash disposal is still fairly unregulated. In 2014 it was deemed a non-hazardous waste according to RCRA (Resource Conservation and Recovery Act), but I can guarantee, you don't want it in your drinking water. Some years ago I learned in my 40 hour MSHA (Mine Safety and Health Administration) trainings, when most accidents occur that affect human safety or the environment, large mining companies pay piddly fines, many of which haven't been increased since the 60s. They are hardly a deterrent, just the cost of doing business as occurs regularly with hundreds of deaths annually in coal mining in China, and probably thousands unreported.

So again, what's so great about bringing back coal? That your husband, fathers or sons, may just fade away into the cost of doing business? I think it's condescending of Trump to believe that workers in mining towns can't be re-trained. I worked with a Uranium miner in Wyoming who moved to farming. I worked with a phosphate miner in Arizona who moved to consulting. But without training programs, we become the world’s miners, and I doubt "Miner" was ever a job description Trump considered for his sons. And still, we sell our "resources" to the highest bidder. All of the last projects I worked on in Wyoming were owned by the Japanese. Many of the investors in the Arizona projects were Chinese. The owners of a Nevada gold project were French. Another Nevada phosphate project was owned by Canadians. I doubt Trump, who is pro-business and keeps most of his holdings overseas anyway, is going to regulate, or has the ability to control, who buys our resources. So without higher education, we will all be indentured servants married to short very painful lives of servitude. Wages have already declined from what were once middle class wages to minimum wage in many industries. And many desk jobs which were once thought of as white collar now pay what blue collar workers made in the 60s. Because they’re educated and sit safely at desks, they don’t think of themselves as blue-collar drones that need to strike for higher pay and better working conditions. But that's a class discussion for another day. A thoughtful review is of the middle class myth is here:

http://www.salon.com/2013/12/30/the_middle_class_myth_heres_why_wages_are_really_so_low_today/

The fact that many of today’s college graduates have the same standard of living as the lowest-skilled workers of the 1960s proves we need to innovate. Certainly the tech industry lives by the mantra "innovate or die", so surely a business man of Trump's "caliber", though we can't be sure since we haven't seen tax records, could grasp such a concept for the good of our country?

The overarching question is, why would we want to go back? We have already moved beyond coal to cleaner technologies that benefit everyone. Basic economics say societies evolve from agrarian societies to industrial then to technological advancements, which is where we are. To go backwards, Trump will have to force companies to create and keep jobs here, which will likely be outsourced a few years later anyway if the companies are to remain competitive in a world market economy. Most Conservatives support small government and free markets. The most extreme, Tea Partiers who are basically Libertarians, believe in laisse- faire economic policies which is all well and good when everyone plays by the same rules, but of course they don't, as we see with currency price fixing in China for example, when they artificially inflate the value of their currency, instead of using currency values set by global markets based on economic efficiencies, or how efficient a certain country is at producing a unit of product or service. Investment risk profiles are made for countries as well as companies, based on such things as government stability, currency volatility, and GDP. When you artificially manipulate these markets, as will have to happen to make coal profitable here where we have higher minimum wages and standard of living, it makes waves in other markets. If Trump wants to optimize an industry which is responsible for producing about 77 percent of CO2 emissions from the electricity sector, and only produces about 39 percent of the electricity generated in the United States, and if he advocates for funding technologies that are becoming obsolete instead of investing in developing technologies, it not only hurts our environment and future earning potential, it leaves us behind in global innovations and market technologies. Rankings from the Program for International Student assessment put our education system behind 35 other countries, just after Estonia and the Slovak Republic. So if we aren't leaders, we will be dragged along as followers, and no one likes to be dragged.

When Trump goes around using strong-arm tactics with companies, he is at odds with free market practices. Market interference, like tariffs, taxes, levies, and price fixing isn't sustainable, unless you keep doing it. And forcing the US back to the industrial revolution isn't the answer. In the 1950s, the United States produced around 50 percent of the worlds durable goods, not because we intentionally specialized in it, but because Europe and Asia were bombed to smithereens and we filled in the manufacturing gaps. When Europe and Asia were rebuilt, we developed a trade deficit as they began to supply. And that deficient continued as we innovated and developed new technologies. Whether you believe in climate change, a proven scientific peer reviewed fact, and whether you prefer to leave your lights on or conserve and turn them off occasionally, no one wants to live with air pollution as already exists in many environmentally unregulated nations, such as China. There are days now regularly in China’s major cities when people are banned from going outside or driving cars because the air quality is so bad. A nation like ours, with an insatiable demand for energy, will be going quickly back to the dark ages when children had all sorts of respiratory problems if we allow coal fired power plants and mining activities to spew more particulates in the air. We’ve been there. Done that…during the industrial revolution. Now let’s move on, and aim for first world health and brighter futures for our children.

An excellent documentary from West Virginia Miners' Perspective (one we rarely hear): http://www.burningthefuture.org/show.asp?content_id=14089

Check out the “America First” Energy Plan and Write your senators and representatives to oppose turning America into a chemical wasteland: https://www.whitehouse.gov/america-first-energy