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Collection: The Dirt on Coal

Latino Voters Oppose Coal Exports

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New research released today by Latino Decisions and the Latino Policy Coalition finds that Latino voters oppose new efforts to export US coal to China and Asia from the West Coast.

As Matt Barreto, co-founder of Latino Decisions and Associate Professor of Political Science and adjunct Professor of Law at the University of Washington reports, a clear majority of Latino voters rejects plans underway to expand coal exports through western cities and ports, by a margin of roughly 6-to-1.

As Latino Decisions senior analyst, Adrian Pantoja, points out, the findings affirm strong green attitudes about climate change and pollution among Latino voters revealed in national polling in the past few years, including a 2013 survey in which Latino Decisions found that 84 percent of Latinos favor the EPA setting more strict air pollution safeguards and 86 percent would support the President using his executive authority to set promote rules that limit carbon pollution. The results also reflect Latino voters’ attitudes about coal as a dirty fuel of the past, harmful to communities, food, kids, and health.

Barreto writes:

The findings from today’s poll release confirm Latinos general support for environmental protection and opposition to carbon pollution. In fact, this is the first poll to question Latinos on the specific topic of coal exports to China, and comes at a time when the US government grapples with coal export policy in the West.

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Coal: Bringing you fish too toxic to eat

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When I was pregnant with my daughter, I wrote a lot on this blog about the dangerous toxics that we carry in our bodies and that pass through us to our babies in the womb and in our breast milk.

So many things gall me about this issue. It seems crazy that we’ve come to a place in history where fish—the best possible source of the long-chain omega-3 fatty acid DHA, which is critical for a baby’s brain and eye development—is so laced with contaminants, in particular methylmercury from coal plants, that it’s often too dangerous for expecting mothers to eat.

It galls me that the onus is on the “woman of childbearing age” to learn about and avoid certain fish and, worse, it’s up to her to weigh the benefits of crucial nutrients for fetal brain development against the risks of damage to her baby’s brain—all while together as a community we give polluters nearly free rein to contaminate those fish.

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PSE Should Do the Math (and Show Its Work)

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Colstrip coal plant

Puget Sound Energy is the biggest electric utility in Washington, supplying power to more than a million homes and businesses. PSE has a well-deserved reputation for supporting clean energy: it is the second-largest generator of wind power among privately-held US utilities, and it runs an award-winning Green Power Program.

Less well known is that PSE also has a large ownership stake in a huge coal-fired power plant that is too old and dirty to meet modern health standards. The Colstrip Generating Station in eastern Montana is facing an overhang of liabilities so severe that PSE’s Washington ratepayers are at risk of exposure to tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions, of dollars in upgrades.

Coal plants like Colstrip are facing potentially costly liabilities that stem from EPA regulations to protect public health: Regional Haze rules to protect air quality in scenic areas; National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) rules that may apply to several types of dangerous pollution from Colstrip; compliance with new rules governing mercury and air toxics; and coal ash treatment. In addition, there are at least two additional liabilities the utility should account for publicly: increasingly expensive coal extraction from the nearby mine and carbon pricing.

When faced with these costs, the utility will inevitably attempt to pass on the costs of these upgrades to its customers in the form of higher rates. But do state ratepayers really want their next energy dollars spent on retrofitting a coal plant?

To answer that question, we need to know more. A lot more.

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Will Puget Sound Energy Double Down on Coal?

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Attention Puget Sound Energy customers: Don’t feel bad if you missed the connection between your electricity bills and today’s headlines about reducing air pollution in scenic Montana. It’s not obvious. But news that the federal government wants owners of the Colstrip coal plant to invest in expensive new equipment to reduce a fraction of its dirty emissions does affect more than 1 million electricity users in Washington State.

That’s because Puget Sound Energy owns the biggest chunk of the power (and the pollution) coming from the Colstrip coal plant in eastern Montana, which is the second-largest coal-fired power plant west of the Mississippi. Last year it released nearly 19,000 tons of nitrogen oxide and 16,000 tons of sulfur dioxide, which form smog or haze that’s unhealthy to breathe and obscures landscapes.

The Environmental Protection Agency has released a new plan that would require Colstrip’s owners to spend $82 million up front, and pay more than $14 million in annual costs, to meet haze standards that protect visibility in the state’s national parks and scenic areas. Puget Sound Energy owns half of the two coal-fired burners that need upgrades under the haze rules (and, unless it works out some kind of deal with other owners, seems like it would be liable for half the costs).

Put simply, older coal plants are too dirty to meet modern air pollution regulations. As anyone who has ever tried to nurse their car towards 200,000 miles can attest, there comes a point where you have to decide whether to keep sinking money into repairs or just get rid of it. All the fixes you need to make—a new clutch, cracked CV boots, old struts, bad wheel bearings—no longer make sense based on the useful life left in the car.

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Dirty-Energy Money

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Big Coal and Big Oil know that, in their business, political friends are worth their weight in gold. An academic study of one case of corporate lobbying estimated the return on investment at 22,000 percent: a dollar spent earned $220. Jack Abramoff, the convicted, influence-peddling super-lobbyist, pegged the return on investment of one project at 100,000 percent: $4 million dollars in lobbying cash purchased a $4 billion tax break for Tyco International.

Inspired by paybacks like those, the dirty-energy industry lavishes money on campaigns and lobbying. Not surprisingly, among its favorite sons are Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas), who famously apologized to BP for Congress’s criticism during the Gulf oil disaster, and Sen. James Inhofe (R-Oklahoma), who insists the science of global warming is a hoax and has likened the US Environmental Protection Agency to the Gestapo. Rep. Barton has raked in $1,914,183 and Sen. Inhofe $1,287,950 from Big Coal and Oil—amounts that bring to mind social critic Upton Sinclair’s observation: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

But what about Cascadia, with our hydropower and wind turbines, energy efficiency and smart growth? Does the lucre of Big Coal and Oil taint our delegation to Congress too? We pulled the numbers from the Dirty Energy Money Campaign, which compares recent Congressional votes on a dozen indicative energy policy issues with campaign contributions from fossil energy companies. The answer is unpleasant: even in the Northwest, Big Coal and Oil are dumping train loads of cash on our democracy—almost $5 million since 1999—and the main recipients are hewing to the dirty-energy line. These figures actually understate dirty-energy political money dramatically. They reflect campaign contributions made by energy companies and their key  employees. They ignore contributions made by major investors in these companies and the huge sums of political money that filter to candidates or their election through the bank accounts of lobbyists, PACs, and Super-PACs. Think of these figures as the tip of the iceberg: the visible part but not the most dangerous part.

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The Tale of Two Electrical Outlets

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This is the tale of two electrical outlets—one that gets an impressive chunk of its power from clean, climate-friendly sources, and another that channels a significant share of its electricity from polluting coal plants.

Funny thing is, the outlets are just a block away from one another.

Thanks to a law that requires utilities in Washington State to disclose where their power comes from, we know quite a bit about how different electricity providers compare. The state’s numbers have their quirks, but they do provide a consistent way for customers to evaluate their utilities’ climate performance.

Those numbers reveal two surprises.  First, even though many northwesterners assume that all of the region’s electricity comes from clean hydropower, in reality 18 percent of the state’s power last year came from dirty coal plants. And second, nearly half of that polluting coal power came from a single utility: Puget Sound Energy.

For a larger version of this chart, click here.

So let’s get back to those two electrical outlets.

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Moving WA Beyond Coal

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blue sky flickr mikaA deal to wean Washington off coal power is a hair’s breadth away from becoming law.

Both houses of the Legislature have approved a bill to close the state’s largest single source of greenhouse gas, mercury, and nitrogen oxide pollution over the next decade and a half. And with the addition of the governor’s signature later this week, Washington will be on track to become the second state in the country (behind Oregon) to retire all its coal plants.

Here are the details:

  • TransAlta will stop producing half of the coal power at its Centralia plant in 2020, and the other half in 2025.
  • In the meantime, the company can sell coal power to utilities through long-term contracts (which would otherwise be prohibited for such a dirty energy source).
  • TransAlta will install pollution controls by 2013 to reduce haze that causes smog and obscures iconic vistas like Mount Rainier.
  • TransAlta will provide $30 million in direct economic development and energy efficiency jobs to the community and another $25 million to develop clean energy technology in the state.

It’s not a perfect agreement, but the fact that one exists at all is exciting. It shows what can happen when different parties – TransAlta, the environmental community, labor groups representing plant workers, faith leaders, economic development experts, state regulators, and elected officials with divergent ideologies – look for genuine points of mutual interest.

It may seem relentless to ask this question right after so many people have invested huge amounts of energy to bring the deal to the finish line.

But here it is: What’s next?

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"Environmentalists Say"

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Once in a while I watch regular broadcast media and I’m just bowled over by how biased it is. For example, check out this King 5 segment on the phase-out of coal at the TransAlta plant in Centralia, Washington. Here’s the opening line:

It produces 12 percent of the state’s electricity, but environmentalists call it Washington’s largest single source of pollution.

What’s wrong with this statement? Pretty much everything.

First, the TransAlta plant does not, in fact, produce 12 percent of the state’s electricity. Even the company only claims it produces 10 percent of the state’s power—and that’s a claim my colleague, Jennifer Langston, has thoroughly debunked.

Second, “environmentalists call it the largest single source of pollution”? Seriously? What is the point of this formulation, if not to make the claim sound suspect?

The truth is it almost doesn’t matter what pollutant you pick—carbon dioxide, mercury, sulfur dioxide, smog-forming compounds, particulate matter—the TransAlta coal plant is far and  away the single biggest polluter in the state. There’s nothing else even remotely comparable. And none of this is controversial or a matter of debate. It’s just the basic facts of the case, the sort of thing one would think a reporter might inquire into.

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Washington’s Bill of (Coal-Free) Health

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rainier flickr orkybashUnder a bill introduced today, Washington State would stop burning dirty coal for electricity within its borders. But aside from healthier air and clearer views of Mt Rainier, would the state’s electricity customers notice any difference?

Probably not.

Washington’s only coal-fired power plant—located n Centralia and owned by the Canadian TransAlta Corp.—is the state’s largest single source of greenhouse gas emissions. It also releases toxic pollutants like mercury and contributes to haze that obscures vistas and national parks around the state.

HB1825, introduced by Rep. Marko Liias, would effectively require the plant to stop burning coal as early as 2015 (ten years earlier than a goal set by Gov. Christine Gregoire). The bill would apply the state’s greenhouse gas emissions performance standard—which limits the amount of climate pollution new power plants can release—to the existing Centralia plant. Because dirty coal emissions would grossly exceed that threshold, TransAlta would have to stop burning it at that point (though the company’s natural gas plant there could keep running.)

Centralia’s coal burners produce roughly 1100 MW of electricity each year—a sizeable chunk of the power generated in the state. But here’s why Washington’s electricity customers shouldn’t be affected by the change.

Utilities such as Seattle City Light, Clark Public Utilities, Puget Sound Energy and Avista generally use their own power plants to meet their customers’ needs. TransAlta is not a utility. It’s an energy company with no local customers or loads to serve. It sells electricity to anyone still willing to buy dirty coal power, and it’s believed that most of its power is bought and used in other states. And studies are underway to identify what investments may be needed to maintain grid stability once the coal plant goes offline.

But the plant is important to the economy of Lewis County. So HB1825 devotes significant attention—and dollars—to what happens in the community after TransAlta stops burning coal there.

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Infants Versus Coal: You Decide

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At EOI’s blog, the single best comparison I’ve seen demonstrating the wretchedness of Washington’s tax and revenue situation: A $23 million cut in King County health programs approved by the Legislature last month means layoffs in Maternity Support Services, [a] program that improves infant survival and health by providing a range of services to 30,000 women … Read more

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