Long ago in a land far away, I observed the massive wheels of industry drawing in riches from the huddled masses... Okay, it was twenty-eight years ago in eastern Kansas and I worked at a coal burning power plant. It was only for six months but my experience there is embedded in me just like the specks of coal dust that I swear are still working their way out of my pores. To this day, just like it was in 1981, you can see the cloud of toxic brown contaminants spewing from the power plant from sixty miles away. Also unchanged is the peculiar sight of the plants two exhaust stacks. Only the south unit of the plant seems to be on-line because it's the one emitting all of the visible pollutants.
After several months of cleaning up conveyor spills, busting up slag, and clearing coal dust from around crushers I had come to understand the basic principles of how the whole system worked. But then one day I asked my boss, Homer, a question and his answer just floored me. (Really, his name was Homer and he was bald and worked at a power plant.) I had noticed that the northern unit had people working there every day but we rarely had to go over there and clean anything up. It was considerably cleaner than the southern unit in all aspects clear up to the stack. So naturally I asked why that unit was never on-line since the stack didn't emit any exhaust. "Oh, it's on-line. Matter-of-fact, it's almost always up and running. There's just a different type of system filtering the exhaust from it", he replied.
Now I'm not an engineer and I really don't know the first thing about energy production. And I'm certainly not a radical eco-nut that wants to throw a wild protest against the electric utilities. But, it's been three decades! That so-called "clean coal" technology that everyone is all hyped up about is the derivative of the technology we had in the early 80's. But like Homer explained, "That costs a lot of money". It's been three decades! And actually, what they can do with coal now is leaps and bounds beyond just a better filtering system. They can take nearly all of the contaminants completely out of the coal itself. So why does the sky over the Marais des Cygnes Wildlife Refuge in eastern Kansas always have a brown murky haze to it? It's been three freakin' decades!!!
Let's approach this differently. Imagine for a moment that it does cost too much to cleanly burn coal and produce energy that way. What about wind power? It is Kansas that we're talking about here and we all know that the wind blows in Kansas. Just a little research on the subject and you'll find that the primary things holding up that type of energy production are 1) esthetics 2) danger to wildlife and 3) the logistics of construction. I don't know about you but here's my take on that. Several square miles of towers with wind turbines on them look better than hundreds of miles of polluted smoke. If a deer or raccoon is stupid enough to get whacked by the blade of a wind turbine then... you get the point. We can build huge architectural marvels but can't put up a bunch of windmills whose origins date back as far as the 9th century? Okay, I'm over-simplifying it but still, it's been three freakin' decades already!!! I guess we would have to keep our eye out for crazy guys in their 50's trying to attack the windmills thinking they were some sort of ferocious giants or something.
In America we seem to make everything political and it's no different with the issue of cleaning up the environment. But let's all just try this little experiment for a moment. Close your eyes, do some deep breathing exercises, relax and imagine a serene country landscape. Do you see any filthy damn streams of smoke in that picture? It's been three, count em' 3, freakin' long, I still had a black and white TV back then, decades!!!!!
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