Elaine Meinel Supkis
The whole world is again, trying to negotiate some sort of Kyoto Accords-style solution for the many pollutants coal and oil create that endanger this entire ecosystem. The key polluter who is absolutely refusing to change anything is the USA. We, in turn, like to point to China. Only there is a hitch: China's energy pollution is in service of the US economy, their main customer of their pollution is the USA which wants super-cheap manufactured goods.
On a per-person basis, Wyoming spews more carbon dioxide than any other state or any other country: 276,000 pounds of it per capita a year, thanks to burning coal, which provides nearly all of the state's electrical power.Yet, just next door to the west, Idaho emits the least carbon dioxide per person, less than 23,000 pounds a year. Idaho forbids coal power plants. It relies mostly on non-polluting hydroelectric power from its rivers.
Texas, where coal barely edges out cleaner natural gas as the top power source, belches almost 1 1/2 trillion pounds of carbon dioxide yearly. That's more than every nation in the world except six: the United States, China, Russia, Japan, India and Germany.
Of course, Texas is a very populous state. North Dakota isn't, but its power plants crank out 68 percent more carbon dioxide than New Jersey, which has 13 times North Dakota's residents.
And while Californians have cut their per-person carbon dioxide emissions by 11 percent from 1990 to 2003, Nebraskans have increased their per capita emissions by 16 percent over the same time frame.
Officials in Wyoming, North Dakota and Alaska say numbers in their states are skewed because of their small populations. But Vermont, Rhode Island and the District of Columbia are similar in size and have one-12th the per-capita emissions of Wyoming.
Our nation was taken over by a gang of criminals who use Texas as their base. They are all connected with the energy industries in Texas and they control our foreign policies as well as our home systems. And of course, they don't want anyone stopping them from doing whatever they want so long as this makes them very, very rich. Like many rich people, they imagine they will be untouched by their own destruction of this planet. How stupid can they be?
Texas generates more coal-burning pollution than FIVE nations in the world. Namely, only Russia, which is an energy exporter to Europe, Japan, the world's #2 economy and China, the world's #3 economy produce more pollution than Texas all by its little lonesome. India has the world's second largest population after China and much of the industries in the West are moving there just as they are moving into China. The two forces at work are pollution and cheap labor. Namely, after 150 years of the Industrial Revolution in the West, the urgent need to clean up means moving the pollution and the industrialization to countries that have joined the Industrial Revolution in the last 50 years.
It is astonishing that Texas produces as much pollution as the biggest industrialized nations with billions of people. Because Texas is an energy state, it pretty much rules the rest of the nation which is why our laws concerning pollution are as primitive as China in many respects. The states in the US that voted for the Bush energy-moguls gang are the ones that are closer to third world nations, the former slave states and Western states that export energy and encourage mining.
From the AP article:
Instead of trying to wean themselves from coal, Texas government officials went out of their way to encourage the state's biggest utility, TXU Corp., to plan for 11 new coal-burning power plants that would have produced even more carbon dioxide. The strategy collapsed when an investor group buying TXU cut a deal with environmentalists to drop plans to build most of the coal plants.
Several years ago, when the sun was very active and one hot summer's day, much of the Norther Grid collapsed due to many forces at work, Bush said he wanted to 'solve' our energy problems by building 100 new coal-burning plants every year. This mad scheme has not come to pass, thank goodness. But it looms over us all. The mining of coal, processing it and using it has a huge impact on our ecosystems. We are burning, in less than 200 years, a full 150 million years of energy from the sun and from biomasses that died in the dim past. Much of this coal comes from when ferns and primitive swamp plants, mosses and molds grew nearly unmolested in huge quantities, filling the earth's atmosphere with oxygen well beyond the levels we have today.
Some scientists theorize the super-giantic insects from back then were able to survive despite having no lungs thanks to the very rich atmosphere. The energy and chemistry of countless living things were then compressed by geological actions, crushed into near-stone density by huge mountains folding over each other as continents crashed violently into each other. Insignificant amounts of various elements, when spread out over many living things and over many, many eons, turn into a toxic stew when in compressed form. And when we burn this stuff, we release, per pound, thousands of tons of earlier biomass that is now very small in size due to compression.
Coal is more compressed than oil. So the pollutants of what would be minor chemicals in individual cells, elements like mercury which could be less than .0001% of a cell, if countless cells are crushed into a piece of coal that is one foot square, the amount of mercury is, per ounce, much, much higher than an equivalent mass of living organisms. Mining, processing and burning coal releases hundreds of millions of years of tiny increments of mercury all at once!
Percentage of U.S. carbon dioxide emissions from coal-burning plants: 31%
Percentage of U.S. mercury pollution from coal-burning plants: 32%
Once this mercury is released back into the enviroment, it seeks to re-enter the biosystem and is easily picked up by anything that lives in or uses lots of water. Mercury doesn't simply merge with rocks, it seeks out biomasses. For some reason, mercury enters our nervous systems probably because evolution used this element within our structures. Over the last 2 billion years or so, the free mercury that was locked into the planet when it formed out of various elements circling the new star, our sun, was incorporated into the life forms that lived entirely in the waters of the earth. The by products of massive stellar explosions over 10 previous billions of years are part of this planet and the DNA chains in the water used many of them for building those things we call 'living creatures.'
Many of the politicians and their supporters in Texas don't want to understand evolution and how it works. They want to believe in a magical world where things appear suddenly in isolation and all is controlled by the Entity, this malevolent creature that is non-living and eternal, a demonic force they call 'God.' Therefore, they refuse to understand how things work with each other and why it is very dangerous to pollute mercury.
For some reason, the life-giving properties of mercury in infitesimally small amounts turns into a poison if it is consumed in too great amounts. We need Chlorine, for example, for our nervous systems, but if we have too much, it kills us. Pure chlorine, if we drink it, is a poison. Mercury, if we consume small amounts, can, over the lifespan, kill and maim. And it attacks the nervous systems. And the longer lived the creature, the more mercury can accumulate.
So controlling pollution from coal-burning plants is life and death for all living things since the mercury produced is injected into the air as well as the water and is carried across the entire planet and at first, it doesn't matter, but over the years, it is significant. And releasing hundreds of millions of years of mercury that has been removed from circulation and locked into coal rocks, will have a significant effect on everyone, everywhere.
Perhaps this is why amphibians who let water pass directly through their membranes, are all dying, all of them, all over the earth. Certainly, I see far fewer than in my own youth when I used to delight in hunting down tadpoles after thunderstorms. It is significant that unlike myself, I used the tadpoles and carried them home in old milk cartons. I would put them in small swimming holes and they would then turn into frogs who would then work in my garden, eating bugs, Bush delighted in stuffing firecrackers in them and throwing them in the air, laughing demonically.
Could tons of neurotoxic mercury now stored in the United States wind up in the hands of poverty-stricken gold miners in developing countries and eventually be released into the environment, where it could end up entering the human food chain? An article scheduled for the May 28 issue of Chemical & Engineering News, ACS' weekly newsmagazine, explores that possibility in a script that reads like an environmental version of the hit film, Blood Diamond.The article, written by C&EN Senior Editor Cheryl Hogue, reveals a little-known market for mercury , a toxic liquid metal now being phased out for most industrial uses in developed countries because of toxicity, among millions of small-scale gold miners in Asia, South America and Africa.
All over the web, people giving advice as to how to save oneself from economic doom like to flack gold hoarding as a safe alternative. But gold mining is one of the most noxious forms of mineral extraction. Unlike coal which releases mercury, gold miners inject into the environment, tons of mercury as they use it to extract the gold by dissolving the quartz that is in conjuction with gold. The higher the price of gold, the more mercury is put into the rivers and forests of many important bio-regions such as the Amazon or Indonesia, for example.
Ancient philosophers considered gold and wealth to be the realm of the dead and I would agree with this. Breeding sheep, oxen and horses increase the 'wealth' of a people, gold can only be used to purchase these same things and often is reburied into the ground. Even today, after parading about its golden shine, people stick this gold into vaults and lock them up and no one sees it again if they can help it.
Guarding these hoards requires military might and constant vigilance. And its sole function is to just sit there, doing nothing at all except existing. Meanwhile, the gold extraction spreads death far and wide and the most precious thing on earth, the living, interlacing life forms which we sprang from, die. A dead planet with a Plutonic hoard of gold locked away in mindless vaults is the definition of Hades.
From the National Environmental Trusts:
This data should sober up oil-consuming Americans! 90% of our potential fossil fuels is now coal? We passed the Hubbert Oil Peak long ago and have been sucking down oil as if there is no tomorrow! At this point, half of our electricity is from coal and this percentage is rising, not falling. Many rivers that were dammable have been dammed already and our nuclear power production has languished since 3 Mile Island.
Mining of coal has increased as our oil has decreased. Since 1980, it has gone up by 25%, roughly. If it continues to rise by 25% per 25 years, it will double every 100 years except for two things: the global Hubbert Oil Peak is nearly here today and the need to abuse energy running systems that are totally inappropriate is rising, not falling, so the rate of increase in use of coal to generate energy will begin to rise 50% per 25 years, roughly twice as fast as in the recent past. In no time, we will blow through all 350 million years of accumulated dead things and have no in-ground energy potential.
I got these graphs which I amended, from the United Nations.
Asia and the US use up the lion's share of coal/oil/gas based energy systems. Ergo: we also pollute the most. Europe uses a lot of Russian gas which is why the EU is constantly barking futile woofs at Putin who swats them contemptuously aside. The natural gas use isn't as polluting as burning coal, not by a long ways. But it is also not infinite and is being used at a madcap rate that can't be sustained for even another 100 years, maybe even 50 years! The biggest manufacturing/energy using nations are responsible for the vast majority of the air pollution and changes in the chemistry of the atmosphere and waters of this planet. The Kyoto Accords recognized this and the biggest energy user 7 years ago, the US, refused to admit the truth that we are the world's biggest polluters and we nixed that treaty. Now, China has caught up Japan and China are both surpassing the US in this matter.
We can't yell at them because we repudiated all this just a mere few years ago. It looks like sour grapes and an attempt at controlling China rather than real concern about the mess our gluttony is creating.
Nationmaster statistics:Here are two charts showing world production of coal and world exportation of coal ranked according to population to coal ratios. These are real eye-openers:
According to this industry report, China produces 400 million tons more coal per annum than the US. This is a recent development. Every week last year, I read about mining accidents in China and the government has been cracking down on these abuses because mining coal is very dangerous and even explosive. Today, there was an earthquake in a coal-mining region and the government vacated the mines. Japan invaded Manchuria seeking coal.
The #2 and #3 nations, the US and India, equal China's vast output. The next 10 countries including former giants like Germany and Russia, together produce less than what China generates.
This chart shows who exports the most coal divided by population to show relative profits gained from this trade. #1 is Australia and guess where all the coal goes? Japan! Greece, #12 on the production list, is #2 on profit exporting list. Both the US and China export coal to Japan. And Japan has the world's #1 trade surplus and guess how that happens?
Count the number of Japanese cars in America and one sees where value-added builds up!
From the Monthly Energy Review:
In 2002, U.S. electricity net generation totaled 3.9 trillion kilowatthours. Electric utilities generated 2.6 trillion kilowatthours (66 percent of the total) and nonutility power producers generated 1.3 trillion kilowatthours (34 percent). The Nation imported 36 billion kilowatthours of electricity and exported 15 billion kilowatthours.
*snip*
At utilities in December 2002, fossil fuels (primarily coal) were forecast to account for 73 percent of net generation, nuclear 18 percent, and renewable resources 10 percent. At nonutility power plants, fossil fuels were forecast to account for 73 percent of net generation, nuclear accounted for 19 percent, and renewable resources 8 percent of the total.
On top of all this is the alarming news that despite us selling coal and Alaskan oil to Japan, we not only have a huge trade deficit with Japan, we also have to buy energy in huge amounts from both Canada and Mexico. And one of the energy products we buy is electricity from hydropower plants in Canada. We buy 21 billion more kilowatthours than we sell. And incidentally, Canada is the #3 nation to run a trade surplus with us.
Coal is king here. All the other energy generation systems equal slightly more than one quarter our electrical generation and the numbers are getting worse and worse, not better!
OCED Energy reports, John Drexhage:
In the IEA 2030 Reference Scenario, “Australia is expected to extend its lead as the world’s biggest exporter of coking coal and, along with Indonesia, continues to dominate steam-coal trade. China remains an exporter, but loses market share, as more of its output is diverted to rapidly growing domestic markets.” (IEA, World Energy Outlook 2006)
Australia is barely noticed by people thinking about global energy systems. But they are the source of much of Japan's energy and are key to Japan's domination of world industrial output and profits. The Japanese government will cheerfully cut airconditiong, heating, etc in order to keep imports from swamping their trade numbers. Unlike the US which is blessed with lots of energy but is very gluttonous, Japan feeds its populace energy is much smaller doses than America.
However, Japan, the largest importer of Australian coal, is considering taxing coal imports to encourage consumption of other fuels. (2006, Energy Information Administration, Official Energy Statistics from the U.S. Government,
*snip*
Norwegian oil production will likely remain steady or decline, depending on developments in the Barents Sea.
Norway exported 2.2 million bbl/d of crude oil and petroleum products in 2005, the majority of it going to the UK (36%) (source Statistics Norway)
See? They will use every tool they can find to prevent Japanese people from using too much energy. The draconian nature of Japanese society and the Military/Industrial ruling elites is being copied by others, namely a certain dragon that dwells next door. The US, far from taxing imported energy to prevent us from using too much of it, has let taxes glide lower and lower and this buys political power as goofy Americans imagine they can get nearly-free energy with no downside and meanwhile, our trade balance falls off the cliff and down into an abyss we will probably never emerge from, ever.
Right now, both Congress and the President are scrambling to find ways to appease voters who are mad over high energy costs. Try selling higher taxes on that baby! And of course, the graphs above clearly show that coal generation of energy is far cheaper in BTUs than any other system except hydrolic.
Per-Capita, Energy-Related Carbon Dioxide Emissions (2003E) 19 metric tons
Population (2005E) 32,805,041
Proven Oil Reserves (January 1, 2006E) 178.8 billion barrels
Oil Production (2005E) 3,151 thousand barrels per day, of which 76% was crude oil.
Net Oil Exports (2005E) 832 thousand barrels per day
Proven Natural Gas Reserves (January 1, 2006E) 56.6 trillion cubic feet
Natural Gas Production (2003E) 6.5 trillion cubic feet
Net Natural Gas Exports (2003E) 3.3 trillion cubic feet
Recoverable Coal Reserves (2003E) 7,251 million short tons
Coal Production (2003E) 68.5 million short tons
Electricity Production (2003E) 566.3 billion kilowatt hours
*snip*
Canada has a unique relationship with the U.S., to which Canada sends approximately 80% of its exports. Canada might, therefore require greater flexibility in its response should the U.S. not become more engaged in a multilateral climate regime.
Canada is worried about pollution but the most irritable people on earth reside in the US and they want to eat their energy cake while eating their energy cake, too. Namely, we are typical gluttons: a bottomless pit of want and lust. We want more energy and in contrast with China where most of the energy is flowing into industrial production while here it is being used for pleasure and glory. Namely, we are consuming energy so we can live like kings and queens and this is bankrupting us rapidly and worse, poisoning the planet and changing the chemistry of the atmosphere and might cause the extinction of many life forms!
What a price to pay for luxury. And remember, gold, wealth and gluttony all lead to death and the Tomb.
Recent Comments