Category: Environment

Related to environmental issues.

Categories
Environment Global Climate Change Public Health

River Spill was a Signal to End Business as Usual

3 kayakers on Animas

Our Animas River received a serious insult recently. Fortunately the river seems to be recovering, but we cannot predict what the long-term effects will be.

Contractors working for the United States Environmental Protection Agency recently released a huge amount of toxic water and tailings from the Gold King Mine. The water spilled into the Animas River, originally named “el rio de las animas perdidas” or the “river of lost souls”.

It wasn’t long before the finger pointing started. The EPA was blamed not only for the spill but also for the long delay in notifying our community. To the EPA’s credit, they are taking responsibility for the accident and for monitoring its environmental effects. There is also talk of compensating the businesses for their loss of revenue.

I am impressed that the EPA’s chief, Gina McCarthy, came to Durango to take command of the event. This is so different from the way the chief executive of BP reacted during the Deepwater Horizon disaster. While his well was polluting the Gulf of Mexico, Tony Hayward went to a sailboat race.

I know little about mining and mine remediation, but I have had plenty of home maintenance projects go awry. I can understand how the contractors working for the EPA could make the mistake that resulted in this tragedy. Fortunately the EPA is accepting responsibility, but I’ll bet that they will be careful in hiring those same contractors again!

The laws that govern hard-rock mining were written over 140 years ago, when the west was wilder and the number of people of European descent was small. Mining claims were inexpensive and easily available. The laws allowed mining with little concern for environmental protection or for remediation. This has lead to hundreds of mines such as Gold King where the value was extracted and the shaft abandoned. Water continues to flow through many of these mines, picking up silt and poisonous metals, as it has for decades. Before the deluge on August 5th up to 250 gallons of contaminated water poured out of the Gold King every minute—that’s 360,000 gallons every day! The flow has increased significantly since the dam was broken.

Folks have been concerned about pollution from the mines in Silverton for years, but insufficient remediation has been done. Being inundated by an estimated 3 million gallons of sickly orange water at one time has finally brought attention to the problem. Unfortunately, it includes international attention that puts southwest Colorado in a bad light.

This is an opportunity for those who believe that the government is too big and has too much power to be critical of the EPA. Many politicians have want to abolish it. We should be wary of their efforts to use this spill as an excuse. That doesn’t make much sense to me, however. If we didn’t have any laws that controlled mining, the Animas would run orange every day!

I think that this catastrophe (to use the word the Herald chose for its headline) will finally motivate cleanup of the Silverton mines. Even more important is to prevent future hard-rock mining problems by changing the ancient mining laws. Furthermore, this spill should motivate legislators to pass “good Samaritan” laws to protect people who work to clean up the mines from liability if things go wrong.

But maybe there is a broader lesson to be learned from the Gold King misfortune. Let me ask a couple of questions: what are we doing now that will result in Gold King-like problems in the future? Are companies charging enough to pay for cleanup that will be required in the future? I think you know what my answers will be.

Let’s look at electricity. Much of our power is generated using coal; indeed, we have two coal-fired power plants just across the border in New Mexico. Testing the mud at the bottom of Narraguinnep Reservoir north of Cortez showed low levels of mercury until about the 1970 stratum, when those plants started up. We are advised against eating fish that are caught there, a consequence of mercury from the power plants. A neurotoxin, mercury is especially bad for the most vulnerable—developing fetuses and the young. Yet the coal companies are trying to reduce the price they pay to the government for coal mined on federal land and they fight public safety regulations.

Climate change is much worse than the mercury problem since it affects all of life. Future generations may never recover from the damage we are causing with anthropogenic climate change.

            © Richard Grossman MD, 2015

Categories
Environment Greenhouse gases

Acknowledge the True Cost of Electricity

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Courtesy of Dr. Drew Shindell

Did you know that the federal government is shortchanging us citizens by a billion dollars a year? Cozy deals with the feds are allowing private enterprise to underpay for natural resources.

Last month I wrote about pressuring educational institutions to divest from fossil fuel investments. Our future health and that of the planet depend on using as little carbon-based fuel as possible.

Now there is more evidence that divestment is the proper path to follow. A New York Times article examines the most common energy source for generating electricity (coal) and suggests that the public is being cheated. Another article in a scholarly journal looks at atmospheric externalities from five different methods of electrical generation and comes up with estimates of the true cost of each. Any way you look at it, short-term gains by big business are robbing citizens of money and health.

Coal on our federal lands belongs to us citizens. Congress set the royalty rate for private companies at about 12% of the sale price for coal strip-mined on federal land. Almost all of that coal is used for generating electricity.

Often a small fraction of the price is actually collected, however. The General Accounting Office found that the effective royalty rate was only 5.6% in Colorado in 2012—less than half of what it should have been! Headwaters Economics, a nonpartisan research group, estimates that the loss each year to US citizens is between 1 and 5 billion dollars. Somehow we are being cheated out of this money. But that isn’t the only bad deal that is robbing us of money and health.

“Externalities” are hidden costs of a product. In La Plata County 2/3 of our electricity comes from coal-fired power plants. There are many externalities that don’t appear on our La Plata Electric Association bills, including greenhouse gases, mercury and health-robbing particulates.

One third of CO2 greenhouse gas emissions in the USA result from electrical generation, but we don’t pay directly for emissions that are causing disasters. Instead, our taxes pay for damage caused by storms and other symptoms of the climate-havoc that CO2 causes. Pregnant women are forbidden from eating many fish because they are contaminated with mercury from burning coal. Some of us pay both with money and with shortened lives for the asthma and other respiratory diseases caused by smokestack particulate emissions. The list of hidden costs goes on and on.

What is the true cost of electricity? LPEA charges domestic customers 11.9 cents per kWh—but that is far from the whole cost. (A kilowatt-hour is a measure of electricity.) Professor Shindell at Duke University has attempted to determine the true cost of energy. His paper “The social cost of atmospheric release” looks at two categories of cost—the core cost and externalities. Interestingly, the core costs of wind, solar and nuclear are all about 10 cents/kWh. None of these sources has significant externalities, according to Shindell. This obviously ignores the possible disasters associated with nuclear, however, as demonstrated by the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. Furthermore, these costs do not include power distribution.

According to Shindell, the cost of generation with natural gas is the least expensive at about 6 cents/kWh, but the externalities add another dime of hidden expense. Coal is a loser: its core cost is a dime, but the externalities add another 27 cents to the true cost! That means that the true cost of electricity generated by coal-fired power plants is 37 cents/kWh.

Shindell’s study just looked at air pollution externalities. Water, in this year of drought, is another externality. While renewable energy uses little or no water, generation with coal requires a huge amount for cooling.

We are lucky to live where forward-thinking LPEA provides our power. Regrettably, more than 2/3 of its power is currently generated by coal. Fortunately it makes renewably generated “Green Power” available for tiny increment in cost. It has programs to encourage energy efficiency, such as paying half the cost of LED light bulbs. It promotes local renewable power generation with wind, hydro and photovoltaic systems, and has encouraged “planting” solar gardens.

What can the electrical consumer do? The first step is to use electricity frugally. Turn off lights when you don’t need them, unplug electrical “parasites” that draw current even when they’re “off” and replace your old refrigerator with an Energy Star one. Next, spend a few dollars a year to get “green” power. Always keep in mind that electrical generation with coal is robbing us of both money and health.

© Richard Grossman MD, 2015