In 1661, activist John Evelyn wrote his anti-coal treatise
FUMIFUNGIUM: or the Inconvenience of the Aer and Smoake of London Dissipated, in which he pleaded with the King and Parliament to do something about the burning of coal in London.
"And what is all this, but that Hellish and dismall Cloud of SEACOALE?" he wrote,
"so universally mixed with the otherwise wholesome and excellent Aer, that her Inhabitants breathe nothing but an impure and thick Mist accompanied with a fuliginous and filthy vapour..."
It would take nearly 300 more years before any real reform would be passed. In 1952, a four-day coal polluted inversion killed roughly 4,000 Londoners. Four years later, the English Parliament would enact the 1956 Clean Air Act, putting an end to the burning of coal to heat London's homes. It was the beginning of serious air-pollution reform in England, and beginning of the end of London's famous "pea-soupers".
At this point you're probably wondering what any of this has to do with my home in Conifer, Littleton, or Golden? Well here is the thing, we are not that far removed from pre-1950 London, we've just done a better job of making our coal pollution less visible and its impact more indirect.
Buildings in the U.S. are our largest source of green house gas emissions, accounting for over 43% of our countries CO2 totals. Our homes make up 49% of the that total or 21% of total CO2 emissions.When you look a bit deeper at the data, about 60% of those emissions can be traced back to purchased electricity from coal fired power plants. So, every time you switch on a light you're most likely drawing power from one of our eight local coal plants.
Before I go any further, I'd like to go on the record that this is not an anti-coal rant. I believe that coal is an important part of our energy future, but we can no longer pretend that "business as usual" coal is not harming our environment and major factor in the creation of global warming.
The Front Range is home to a total of eight coal fired power plants that collectively emit 1,669 tons of sulphur dioxide, 3,849 tons of nitrogen oxides, a whopping 24.6 million tons of carbon dioxide (the equivalent of about 5 million cars!) and some 378 pounds of mercury.
In addition, EPA researchers estimate that fine particle pollution from power plants shortens the lives of about 115 Coloradoans each year. Fine particle pollution from power plants in Colorado also causes 21,425 lost work days, 91 hospitalizations and 3,611 asthma attacks every year, 52 of which are so severe they require emergency room visits. In addition, over 750,000 children in Colorado live within 30 miles of a coal-fired power plant and over 50,000 those children suffer from asthma.
Coal power plants are responsible for 41 percent of the total mercury emitted by all known U.S. Sources and approximately 30% of all lakes sampled in Colorado exceed the EPA fish tissue standard for mercury. A U.S. Geological Survey found that power plant pollution is directly linked to elevated mercury levels.
Mercury is a toxic heavy metal, which, when ingested, can cause serious neurological damage, particularly to developing fetuses, infants, and children. Children can be exposed to mercury in the womb or through breast milk if their mothers ingest mercury tainted fish or by consuming contaminated fish themselves. The neurotoxic effects of mercury exposure are similar to the effects of lead toxicity in children and include delayed development and cognitive deficits, language difficulties, and problems with motor function, attention, and memory.
So today in the year 2007, we find ourselves in much the same position characterized by the "fuliginous and filthy vapour(s)" of our friend John Evelyn back in 1661 London. It's unreasonable to think that our huge infrastructure of coal fired electric utilities will change any time soon. That will take strong, inspired leadership, followed by enlightened legislation and even if fast tracked one or two decades of effort. So the problem will have to met on both the supply and demand side, and a good deal of the demand comes from our homes.
So instead of telling our children to "turn off the lights, its costing money", we need to tell them to "turn off the lights, its costing lives and the future of our environment", and we need to tell them why. Not to lay blame, not to ring hands, but to lay a foundation for action.