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The Dirty Secret Behind America's Energy Future
by Jeff Goodell
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In truth, the United States is more dependent on coal today than
ever before. The average American consumes about twenty pounds of it a
day. We don’t use it to warm our hearths anymore, but we burn it by wire
whenever we flip on the light switch or charge up our laptops. More than one
hundred years after Thomas Edison connected the first light bulb to a coal-
fired generator, coal remains the bedrock of the electric power industry in
America. About half the electricity we consume comes from coal—we burn
more than a billion tons of it a year, usually in big, aging power plants that
churn out amazing quantities of power, profit, and pollution. In fact, electric
power generation is one of the largest and most capital-intensive industries in
the country, with revenues of more than $260 billion in 2004. And the rise of
the Internet—a global network of electrons—has only increased the
industry’s power and influence. We may not like to admit it, but our shiny
white iPod economy is propped up by dirty black rocks.
This was not how things were supposed to go in America. Coal
was supposed to be the engine of the industrial revolution, not the Internet
revolution. It once powered our steamships and trains; it forged the steel that
won the wars and shaped our cars and skyscrapers and airplanes. It kept
pioneers warm on the prairie and built fortunes for robber barons such as
Henry Frick and Andrew Carnegie. Without coal, the world as we know it
today would be impossible to imagine. There should be monuments to coal in
every big city, giant statues of Pennsylvania anthracite and West Virginia
bituminous. It is literally the rock that built America.
But we’ve been hooked on coal for almost 150 years now, and like
a Bowery junkie, we keep telling ourselves it’s time to come clean, without
ever actually doing it. We stopped burning coal in our homes in the 1930s, in
locomotives in the 1940s, and by the 1950s it seemed that coal was on its
way out for electricity generation, too. Nuclear power was the great dream of
the post–World War II era, but the near-meltdown of the Three Mile Island
nuclear plant in 1979 put an end to that. Then natural gas overtook coal as
the fuel of choice. If coal was our industrial smack, natural gas was our
methadone: it was clean, easy to transport, and nearly as cheap as coal.
Virtually every power plant built in America between 1975 and 2002 was gas-
fired. Almost everybody in the energy world presumed that the natural gas
era would soon give way to even cleaner sources of power generation—wind,
solar, biofuels, hydrogen, perhaps someday solar panels on the moon. As for
the old coal plants, they would be dismantled, repowered, or left to rust in the
fields.
But like many revolutions, this one hasn’t progressed quite as
planned.
Energy-wise, the fundamental problem in the world today is that the earth’s
reserves of fossil fuels are finite but our appetite for them is not. The issue is
not simply that there are more people in the world, consuming more fossil
fuels, but that as economies grow and people in developing nations are lifted
out of poverty, they buy cars and refrigerators and develop an appetite for
gas, oil, and coal. Between 1950 and 2000, as the world population grew by
roughly 140 percent, fossil fuel consumption increased by almost 400
percent. By 2030, the world’s demand for energy is projected to more than
double, with most of that energy coming from fossil fuels.
Of course, every barrel of oil we pump out of the ground, every
cubic foot of natural gas we consume, and every ton of coal we burn further
depletes reserves. For a while, our day of reckoning was put off by the fact
that technological innovation outpaced consumption: the more fossil fuels we
burned, the better we became at finding more, lulling us into a false belief
that the world’s reserves of fossil fuels are eternal. But that delusion can’t
last forever. In fact, there are increasing signs that it won’t last much longer.
Copyright © 2006 by Jeff Goodell. Reprinted with permission by Houghton Mifflin Company.
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