Recent news out of China should make us here in the States sit up and pay attention.
According to this story (http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-china-birth-defects2-2009feb02,0,3417123.story) in the LA Times, government officials acknowledge birth defects among Chinese babies are increasing at an alarming rate and the culprit is the degradation of the environment.
The particular culprit leading to the nearly 40 percent increase in birth defects over a five year period is the fact that the Chinese get their electricity from burning coal. The increase is the highest near those coal-burning power plants.
These findings reinforce US research that links pollution to the incidence of birth defects.
Coal is one of the nastiest fuels out there. In fact, it's hard to find a fuel that is dirtier or causes more harm than coal, especially the coal burned in Texas.
In Texas -- as well as in much of the south -- power companies burn lignite. Lignite is a very soft coal and usually easy to mine. In fact, there is a seam of lignite that stretches from about Uvalde, near the Texas/Mexico border, through Central Texas and into the Appalachians.
Find a map showing the locations of coal-burning power plants and you'll see a correlation between electric power and that seam of lignite.
Here's the rub. Burning lignite to produce electricity also produces extremely high concentrations of pollution including heavy metals like mercury. Heavy concentrations of mercury are easy to find in stock ponds around Central Texas power plants. Mercury is highly toxic, so toxic that folks who live near those power plants are well advised to limit how often they eat the fish stocked in those ponds.
I bring this up because we're talking a lot these days about "clean coal technology." First of all, we have to acknowledge that this simply does not exist, yet. Secondly, we need to take a very hard look at the waste generated by our current coal technology ... and how "capturing" more of the pollutants from burning coal will increase the hazardous nature of that waste.
The mercury will still be there. So will the carbon and the rest of the toxic stew.
Indeed, a lot of that stuff is still around. There is over 314,000 tons of the stuff stored in Milam County, Texas ...
Is it really all that safe? "They" say it is but the people who say that are the same ones who, for nearly five decades, told us that asbestos was perfectly safe.
