Carl Pope: The Empire Fights Back

Yesterday I wrote about post-election challenge #1 — helping states that have not yet begun to reap the fruits of a clean-energy future get on the bandwagon with concrete government policies designed to help energy innovators win. But we also need to play a strong defensive game, because coal and oil are going to try to strike back. They’ll try to block, of course, any federal government action to reduce carbon pollution or to respond to the threat of climate disruption. Most of the incoming Republican members of Congress have taken the position that global warming isn’t real, that even if it is real it isn’t caused by pollution and that even if it is real and it is caused by pollution, North Dakota could use more beach resorts anyway. But important as that battle is, it’s not their real objective. The coal and oil interests understand that although the American people see climate change as a long-term problem that they would like to see solved but that might not get solved right away, there are other threats for which the public is much less tolerant. Coal-fired power plants, for example, are responsible for almost half the mercury that is polluting our fisheries — at a time when one young American woman in six has a level of mercury in her body that could threaten any child she bears. Living near a coal-ash disposal site — as millions of Americans do — can be more toxic than smoking a pack of cigarettes a day. Overall the health costs of poorly regulated coal burning are $100 billion a year, and 14,000 Americans die annually as a consequence of unregulated pollution. Oil brings its own set of problems. Communities near refineries suffer the same kind of toxic air pollution as those near coal plants. But as we saw last summer, a huge part of the risk from oil comes from the wellhead — blowouts that like the one that devastated communities on the Gulf of Mexico are unusual for the U. S., but they happen routinely elsewhere around the world as oil companies produce for the U. S. market in the cheapest way they can in countries like Nigeria. Every year, as Boone Pickens likes to point out, America ships about half a trillion dollars of our wealth, and three million American jobs, overseas to pay for our oil imports