Healing Our World: Weekly Comment: President Bush's Policies

By Jackie Alan Giuliano, Ph.D.

Killing Tomorrow for a Few Megawatts Today

We have a beautiful
mother
Her green lap
immense
Her brown embrace
eternal
Her blue body
everything
we know.
-- Alice Walker

The modern day American system of governance has an attribute that the founding fathers of our country may not have anticipated. Today, the primary qualifications for assuming public office seem to be personal wealth and a vested interest in major industries. So, the people making life or death decisions for the American people, their children, and the children of tomorrow, are increasingly becoming the least qualified to be making those judgments.

The last few weeks have seen members of the new presidential administration deciding that levels of arsenic pollution that have been endorsed by the World Health Organization are too low for Americans.

People whose last science class was years ago in college are telling the world's health professionals that since such controls would be a burden to polluting industries, they will not be implemented.

President George W. Bush (Photo courtesy the White House)

The U.S. has less than five percent of the world's population, yet we produce nearly 25 percent of the world's waste, hazardous substances, and greenhouse gases.

The president also closed the White House special offices on AIDS policy and race relations and, in a move that has stunned women's groups, announced he will not reopen a special White House office on women's issues.

In the wake of President Bush's decision to renege on his campaign promise to require coal burning power plants to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, he has imperiled our health and compromised the future of people all over the world.

The door has now been flung wide open for energy companies to increase investments in a form of fuel that most of us had hoped was on the way out. The U.S. government is embracing coal, the dirtiest form of fuel, and energy producers around the country have begun expanding this archaic, filthy form of power generation.

Moving coal at Niagara Mohawk's Dunkirk steam station in New York. This coal-fired station produces 600,000 kilowatts of 60 cycle power. (Photo by David Parsons courtesy National Renewable Energy Lab)

A large percentage of the coal used in these plants comes from strip mines on Indian Reservations that are so huge, they can be seen from Earth orbit. Since 1974, the Mojave Generating Station and the Navajo Generating Station in Arizona have been polluting the world's air. The Mojave Generating Station alone uses 18,240 tons of coal per day at full load. Combined, the two plants require 12 million tons of coal a year and are the largest polluters in the country. Astronauts saw the pollution cloud from these coal fired plants from the Moon!

Black Mesa, Arizona, home of the Hopi Indian Reservation and several thousand Navajo is a classic example of the abusive ethic that is destroying our world. Because the Peabody Group wants to expand its coal strip mine, the U.S. government has been leading the forced relocation of the native people who remain at the site, a place they have inhabited since the U.S. Army tried to wipe them all out in 1863.

The coal-fired Navajo Generating Station near Page, Arizona (Photo courtesy of Northern Arizona University)

Coal fired power plants emit more toxic pollution than any other form of energy production. For every megawatt hour of electricity produced, coal generates 2,071 pounds of carbon dioxide, 13.8 pounds of sulfur oxides, 4.8 pounds of nitrogen oxides, and 3.2 pounds of particulate matter.

By comparison, natural gas emits 1,205 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt hour, 0.008 pounds of sulfur oxides, 4.3 pounds of nitrogen oxides, and negligible particulate matter.

Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas that is contributing to global warming, trapping in heat from the Sun and raising global temperature.

Some scientists say that within 50 years, all the world's glaciers may melt. This, combined with a predicted 10.5 degree increase in global temperature over the next century, could raise sea level around the world as much as 10 feet over the next 1,000 years. This process has begun in our lifetimes, and certainly in our children's lifetimes, and we may see many coastal cities around the world obliterated.

Volcanoes, sea spray, rotting vegetation and plankton emit sulfur dioxide (SO2). But the largest amounts of it come from the burning of coal and oil. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says that high concentrations of SO2 can result in breathing impairment for asthmatic children and adults who are active outdoors. Short term exposures of asthmatic individuals to elevated SO2 levels can result in reduced lung function.

Effects associated with longer term exposures include respiratory illness, alterations in the lungs' defenses, and aggravation of existing cardiovascular disease. Individuals with cardiovascular disease or chronic lung disease, as well as children and the elderly, are particularly at risk.

SO2 is also a primary component of acid rain. The pollutant travels hundreds or thousands of miles from where it is emitted and falls with rain, forming sulphuric acid that kills life in lakes and streams, kills forests, eats through paint on cars, and destroys buildings. Outdoor sculptures all over the world are being eaten away by acid rain exposure.

Cherokee Station coal powered plant Denver, Colorado. (Photo by Warren Gretz courtesy National Renewable Energy Lab)

A report released by the Harvard School of Public Health in May 2000 said that two coal fired plants in Massachusetts were responsible for affecting 32 million people in New England, New York, and New Jersey. The report said that the two plants were responsible for an estimated 43,000 asthma attacks and 159 premature deaths per year.

Between 1988 and 1997, SO2 was decreasing in the U.S. thanks largely to the Clear Air Act and the fact that no new coal fired plants were being built. That situation is surely to change with the new Bush administration's rollbacks of pollution controls.

Many analysts are seeing these environmentally destructive policies as payback for the huge contributions made to the Republican campaigns by industry. For example, electric utility companies gave a record $16.4 million to Republicans, says the Center for Responsive Politics. They gave $6 million to Democrats.

The chairman of the Peabody Coal Group, one of the nation's largest coal companies, contributed $250,000 to the Republican National Committee.

Don't be fooled by rhetoric from our greedy industrialist leaders that coal is cheap and that it can be made "green." The faulty arithmetic used by politicians conveniently omits the costs of increased health care and environmental destruction from the equation. If the true costs of coal were figured in, it would rival nuclear power as the most expensive form of power plant fuel. And coal can't be made very green with today's technology.

Many environmental analysts continue to insist that serious energy conservation efforts in the U.S. could eliminate any energy crisis and the need for new power plants. Sadly, serious conservation efforts are not encouraged in a land where the country's health is measured by the rate of industry expansion and the consumption of goods, most of which require electricity.

Now more than ever before, it is important for your voice to be heard. Write President Bush and your local legislators and put them on notice that you will not tolerate creating a healthy, favorable climate for business and industry while the climate of our planet and the health of our children is trashed.

Tell your elected representatives that you personally are working to change our nation's priorities and that you no longer put the acquisition of goods and the consumption of resources as your reason for living.

Tell them that you have no use for a system that creates a robust economy by polluting the earth, the air, the water, and our bodies. Tell them that you are, as of this very minute, no longer working for the greedy three percent of the population that gets rich because we demand cheap goods and services and work hard to buy them.

Tell them that your top priority is now the health and happiness of your family and the restoration of your connection to the natural world. If we told all these things to our elected leaders, it would scare them to death - and hopefully into action.

RESOURCES

1. Read about the details of the toxic coal industry in an Environment News Service article at: http://ens.lycos.com/ens/aug2000/2000L-08-15-06.html

2. Read about the plight of the Hopi and Navajo people as they fight for their survival against the Peabody Coal Company in Healing Our World articles at: http://www.jps.net/jackieg/articles/may03-1999g.html. For the current status of this crisis, visit the Action Resource Center at: http://www.arcweb.org/campaigns/big_mountain/.

3. For a thorough, and chilling, summary of the Bush administration's recent assault on the environment, see the "Seattle Times" special report.

4. Read about the dangers of sulfur dioxide at: http://www.epa.gov/oar/aqtrnd97/brochure/so2.html

5. See the Harvard study at: http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/press/releases/press05042000.html

6. Find out who your Congressional representatives are and e-mail them. If you know your Zip code, you can find them at: http://www.visi.com/juan/congress/ziptoit.html

7. Contact President Bush at: president@whitehouse.gov. Tell him that this assault on the environment and on our health must stop.

8. Use your voice at the Act For Change website operated by Working Assets. There, you can easily send email messages on a variety of issues to the right people.

[Jackie Alan Giuliano, Ph.D. is a writer and teacher in Seattle. He can be found preparing for the birth of his son, wondering how to keep him healthy in this troubled world. Send your thoughts and ideas to him at: jackie@healingourworld.com and visit his web site at: http://www.healingourworld.com]