Shhhhh.
Listen.
Can you hear it?
Clink, clink, clink.
What’s that?
It’s cocktail glasses clinking in celebration.
Where?
In the ivory towers of America’s corporate polluters.
President Donald Trump and his minions at the Environment Protection Agency (EPA) are spewing “fake news.” Science clearly disputes the propaganda that coal is “clean” and “beautiful.”
But it is a fact that coal is a cheap source of energy, and it creates jobs. But coal is nasty. Coal pollutes the air, causing multiple health issues. That doesn’t include the thousands of coal miners who suffered and/or died from black-lung disease. And once burnt, the black lumps of fossil fuel leave toxic coal ash as industrial waste.
Coal is
not clean or beautiful. On
Aug. 7, 2019, this cartoon illustrated a column that I wrote: “PSC and Georgia
Power take a ‘giant leap’ for environment.” Since then, both parties have
backtracked. Today, it’s “burn, baby, burn” for coal and pollution.
Nonetheless, corporate polluters are celebrating the EPA’s rollback on rules for burning coal and the handling of its poisonous coal ash. Chalk one up for the industrial lobbyists who persuaded the current administration to loosen the EPA’s grip on its original purpose.
That mission includes “to protect human health and the environment. It ensures Americans have clean air, land, and water, enforces environmental laws. … The agency works with partners to manage risks, improve environmental quality, and manage environmental stewardship.”
Do you think we should translate “partners” to polluters?
The news out of Washington is disappointing, but the announcement is no surprise. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum was quoted as saying that the administration’s goal for coal plants “is 100% stay open, no more retirements, no more shutting down.” Secretary Burgum is merely trumpeting what’s coming out of the Oval Office.
Allow me to digress, briefly.
Whether you agree or disagree with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., our health secretary has pledged to “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA). Do you see the hypocrisy of two taxpayer-funded federal agencies tugging in opposite directions? One is trying to make us healthy, and the other determined to make us sick.
Now, back to those clinking cocktail glasses.
Few, if any, utilities have a more powerful army of state and federal lobbyists than Georgia Power and its parent, the Southern Company. They know how to leverage their dollars to get the best results. As Sherlock Holmes would say, “My dear Watson, they don’t call it Georgia Power for naught.”
Surely there are clinking glasses in the ivory tower of Georgia’s largest electricity provider. Perhaps Georgia Power knew that the EPA would one day say, “Don’t worry about the toxic coal-ash mess you created. It’s OK to pollute.”
That day has arrived.
I guesstimate that over the years Georgia Power has burned billions of tons of coal. And while it has cleaned up many of its coal-ash ponds, there are still millions of tons sitting in groundwater of leaky ponds, potentially leaking harmful heavy metals into our water supply. What’s “clean” and “beautiful” about that?
Georgia Power’s recent estimate was $8.5 billion to remove the toxic waste from the remaining ponds. Did the EPA just give the utility a “get-out-of-jail-free” card?
Georgia Power is such a valuable economic partner for our state. We need Georgia Power, and it needs us. A few years back, when the company pledged to quit coal, I offered praise. And then it backtracked. Georgia Power must have known that Washington was going to eventually declare, “Burn, baby, burn.”
If the president, the EPA and its polluting partners really believe coal is clean and beautiful, I have a suggestion for the partiers.
Spike your celebratory cocktails with arsenic-and-lead-laced coal-ash slush.
Take a swig and say, “Cheers.”
“What? That is dangerous. And ludicrous!” you exclaim.
Yeah, I know.
So are the new coal rules.
dnesmith@cninewspapers.com
