Rachel's Democracy & Health News #948, February 28, 2008

THE LINK BETWEEN TOXIC CHEMICALS AND GLOBAL WARMING

[Rachel's introduction: If we could all climb out of our foxholes for a moment and look around, we might see a huge opportunity spreading out before us: the solutions to global warming and toxic chemicals are both being thwarted by one group of people: coal company executives and their helpmates.]

By Peter Montague

As never before, opportunity is knocking for activists. The solutions to global warming and chemical contamination are both peeking over the horizon and they look very much alike. The timing is perfect for building a global coalition to promote waste-free green chemistry (or clean production), end the rush toward coal-burning power plants, stuff the nuclear genie back into the bottle, power the future with sustainable solar energy, and advance environmental justice worldwide. From all this can flow many millions of truly green jobs.

Global warming and chemical contamination are two sides of the same coin, and solutions to both are now converging. Activists fighting coal, fighting nuclear, fighting dangerous waste technologies (landfills, incinerators and incinerators-in-disguise), fighting for the cleanup of superfund sites and brownfields and toxic emissions, fighting all the chemicals-and-health fights (childhood cancers, autism, diabetes, asthma, Parkinson's and so many other environment- linked diseases), and fighting for justice, joined with activists promoting solar, wind and biofuels, promoting tidal power and geothermal, promoting green jobs, clean production and green chemistry -- could now work together toward a common purpose. The combination would create a mountain of political power.

To curb global warming, we can transition as rapidly as possible to renewable solar, geothermal and tidal power, and to end chemical contamination we can transition as rapidly as possible to green chemistry. But to do either of these things, we first must get around one huge obstacle: the coal industry. I know that some influential people are saying that fossil fuels are over, that oil has peaked and coal is dead, but there's more to it than that.

Yes, perhaps oil has reached -- or soon will -- peak production and will be declining in volume each year, which foretells steadily rising prices (as we have seen -- a 10-fold increase since 2000). But coal is not dead. Coal executives are planning to turn coal into liquid fuels and into chemical feedstocks to replace oil. If they succeed, they will entrench coal for the next 100 years, derailing the drive toward green chemistry and clean production, and eliminating the incentives for renewable energy. This is a strategic fork in the road to the future. Which will we choose? This is a moment in history when activism can make a crucial difference.

There is still a huge (though surprisingly uncertain) amount of coal in the ground, especially in the U.S., and we would be naive to think that the people who own that coal are going walk away from it emptyhanded. Until it is all used up, they plan to (a) burn it for electricity, (b) turn it into liquid fuels (diesel, kerosene and jet fuel), or (c) turn it into chemical feedstocks (to create plastics, pesticides, solvents, etc.)-- or they will sell it to China, which will then burn it, liquify it, or turn it into chemicals. Peabody Energy of St. Louis, the largest private coal company in the world, opened an office in Beijing in 2005 because Chinese coal mines cannot keep up with demand, and U.S. coal exports are now helping fill that gap.

With coal-fired electric power now being fought to a standstill by a swarm of grass-roots activists all across the U.S., coal-to-liquids (CTL) and coal-to-chemicals are the most promising paths to salvation for the coal industry. Private chemical companies can build coal-to- chemical plants on their existing premises without getting any special licenses of the kind required for electric utilities. Eastman Chemical (formerly a part of Eastman Kodak) already derives 20% of its chemical feedstocks from coal and is thinking about pushing that up to 40%.[1] General Electric -- which sells coal gasification equipment needed for both coal-to-liquids and coal-to-chemicals -- wants to sell coal gasifiers to electric utilities, "But in the near term, turning coal to chemicals offers the most significant opportunities," says Edward C. Lowe, general manager of gasification for GE Energy.[1]

Coal-to-liquids and coal-to-chemicals both use heat and pressure to break the molecular bonds in coal, producing gases (mostly carbon monoxide and hydrogen), which can be recombined to make various fuels and chemical feedstocks for paints, food additives, fertilizers, plastics, and all manner of other modern molecules. Germany commercialized these chemical processes before World War II, but after the war cheap oil shoved coal-gas technology to the back burner. Now oil is growing expensive and the chemical industry is paying roughly $40 billion per year for petroleum-based feedstocks, so that's a huge new market for Big Coal to penetrate. If they succeed, they're saved, if not, they're sunk. Their back is to the wall.

Coal-to-chemicals plants will try to bury their waste carbon dioxide (CO2) in the ground, just the way coal-fire power plants say they want to do -- so coal-to-chemicals and coal-to-liquid-fuels could provide a laboratory for the untried "carbon capture and storage (CCS)" technologies needed to create so-called "clean coal." If they can convince people that CCS works -- and will keep working safely for thousands of years into the future -- they're saved; if not, they're sunk. Current U.S. energy policy is providing large taxpayer subsidies to coal-with-CCS, starving the research budget for renewable energy.

The Wall Street Journal reported late last year that western chemical companies are now flocking to China to participate in coal- to- chemicals projects, some of which have an experimental carbon burial (CCS) component. Because of cheap labor and lax regulations, such plants cost 30% to 50% less to build in China than in the U.S. Several Chinese companies already use coal to manufacture vinyl chloride monomer, the building block of PVC ("vinyl") plastic, and American and European chemical firms want some of that action. "No one's made any real commitments yet, says the editor of Chemical Week magazine, "but it's clear that this is the beginning of a wave."[1] (Get more data about coal gasification in China and worldwide from these slides.)

Coal-to-liquids and coal-to-chemicals will not develop in the U.S. without a knock-down fight. This is where a big coalition of toxics, environmental health, energy, and green jobs and environmental justice activists could weigh in: Stopping coal-to-chemicals is essential to create space for the emergence of clean production, green chemistry, renewable energy and green jobs with justice. We are not going to have a coal-based chemical industry and a green chemical industry. We'll have one or the other, not both. And the same is true for electric power: if the public can be convinced that "clean coal" is really clean and really safe, incentives for renewables will dry up. We'll have coal or renewables, not both.

Here's the thing. The Achilles' heel of the coal-to-chemicals industry, the coal-to-liquid-fuels industry, and the coal-fired electric power industry is carbon dioxide. Compared to petroleum-based fuels, coal-based fuels produce twice as much CO2 per gallon. With Wall Street already looking askance at all coal-based technologies because of the near-certainty that carbon emissions will face expensive regulation one of these days, plans to bury CO2 in the ground take on new urgency for the coal corporations. With it, they may have a future; without it, they're sunk. To stop coal, activists just have to frighten the money.

Rarely in history have activists on such a a broad range of issues been offered such a clear strategic opportunity to work together to kill a deadly, wasteful dinosaur like the coal-to-liquids, coal-to- chemicals and coal-to-electricity industries, simultaneously opening up a future of green possibilities for ourselves, for the world, and for our children.

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[1] Claudia H. Deutsch, "Chemical Companies Look to Coal as an Oil Substitute," New York Times April 18, 2006.