This message is being e-mailed to various coal organizations and specific leaders, where I could find the e-mail addresses on the Internet. I suggest departments receiving this message pass it along to the CEOs.
Your jobs are on the line, because the Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency are taking direct aim at your industry. There are two articles directly related to coal in the January 30 issue of Chemical and Engineering News
The first article is entitled, "US Energy Supply and Demand". The subtitle says, "Forecast: Report predicts growth for domestic oil gas and renewables and a decline for coal". The article is essentially a report from the Energy Information Administration (EIA) it should be noted that the EIA is part of the US Department of Energy (DOE), which has been antagonistic to use of fossil fuels in the US, and has been strongly promoting renewable energy, in the form of solar, wind, and biocellulosics.
The EIA report predicts that electricity generation from coal will drop from its present 50% to 39% in 2035. It says that the decline will be due to a combination of slow growth in demand for electricity, continued competition from natural gas and renewable energy, and the need to comply with environmental regulations.
I am sure that you will agree competition from natural gas is only a matter of normal economics. However, the other two factors are government controlled. The US government has plowed billions of taxpayer dollars into developing renewable energy, with the present result, as reported by Fox news, that renewable energy constitutes now only 3% of the total energy use. I foresee that renewable energy will have little impact on coal consumption, but renewable energy development is a waste of national resources and has at least slight negative impact on your industry. I suggest you petition Congress to force the Department of Energy and the White House to eliminate subsidizing renewable energy development. More importantly, the big negative aspect for the coal industry is the matter of environmental regulations. The coal industry has been doing a good job in controlling sulfur dioxide emissions, which leads to acid rain, but you have the technology and financial ability to do more on this. You also have the ability to control mercury emissions. I personally believe the matter of mercury bioaccumulation in fish is overblown, but it has caught the public eye and must be addressed.
This first C&E News article touches only slightly on carbon dioxide from burning all fossil fuels. It presumes that carbon dioxide emissions will increase by 3% between 2010 and 2035, and this is assumed to be a negative. While it is only slightly mentioned in this article, carbon dioxide emission from burning coal is a major consideration, because it would require a tremendous introduction of capital for sequestration equipment and would unnecessarily hamstring the industry. I will describe later how this can be avoided.
The second C&E News article is entitled, "Mapping Greenhouse Gases". The article covers three pages and explains that EPA has developed a new interactive tool to analyze greenhouse gas emissions from more than 6700 power plants, chemical plants, refineries, and other facilities. The details of the "interactive tool" are not significant. The main point is that the EPA continues to place before the public a program condemning carbon dioxide emissions, which by association also condemns the coal industry. I realize that by and large the coal industry has attempted to present before the public a more favorable light by talking about clean coal, but it has basically done nothing with respect to the increasing negative connotations of carbon dioxide emissions, which will eventually kill the industry or at least maim it, if nothing more is done.
The whole matter of carbon dioxide emissions is related to global warming which first engendered fear in the American public through the negative claims Al Gore. Just a few of these negatives are the decreasing size of the Greenland ice sheet, disturbing the habitat of polar bears, coastal flooding from higher sea levels, and more extreme weather patterns such as droughts, cyclones and hurricanes. All of these factors are speculative, but they have caught the eye and fear of the public. Fortunately, there have been enough clear heads up to now such that there has been no significant regulation of carbon dioxide emissions. However, continued pressure from the EPA could push this over the line, and the coal industry must address it in its fundamentals.
The theory of global warming is that the presence of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere serves as a one-way barrier to the passage of radiation from the sun and dispersal of heat from the earth's surface to interstellar space. The Sun's radiation is said to pass through the atmosphere on its way to the earth, where it is converted to heat, which then cannot escape to interstellar space through that CO2 barrier. Using an analogy of a greenhouse, where the sun's radiation enters the greenhouse through glass or plastic and then increases the interior temperature, carbon dioxide has been termed a "greenhouse gas". It should be noted that this is also a theory, because there have been no measurements to show that carbon dioxide has any heat insulating properties similar to that of glass or plastic. It should also be noted that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is only 0.4 %. An obvious question is whether the main constituents of the atmosphere, nitrogen and oxygen, have less heat insulating properties than carbon dioxide, and especially considering the low carbon dioxide concentration.
It is well known that fear is primarily based upon ignorance. If the theory of carbon dioxide global warming can be discredited through scientific experimentation, it is highly likely that the public fear of global warming could be transferred from carbon dioxide and coal burning to variations in the sun's activities. I strongly suggest that rather than confining all coal organization operations to lobbying Congress on the basis of "talk", some assets should be designated for determining the true position of carbon dioxide as an atmospheric heat insulator. This could be done through one or two well-placed university grants to professors who can take an objective view unrelated to the politics and ideology involved. There is some risk that such scientific work could prove disadvantageous to the coal industry, but I consider this extremely unlikely in view of Internet research I have done up to now.
