You can't make fertilizer (Cyanamid process) or steel (blast furnace) without coal.

I'm beginning to wonder how long it's going to be before we're getting our gasoline from coal. Germany did it during WWII.

no particular comment but kudos all around on several levels here. (i admired the thought, work, and tone and readability but mostly there was an enjoyment factor here. odd to say for such a topic, i know, but there it was. maybe that's been a growing subconscious reaction to your stuff for some time -but it just finally bubbled up to the surface. like how before you got to the death rent link, i was already going to that thought and laughed when i got to the link, and so on.)

somewhat relatedly:

David Peace on Thatcher's Britain
Riot Squads, Privatization and the National Front
By RON JACOBS
Counterpunch
Weekend Edition

In 1984, the Thatcher regime and the British National Coal Board annulled an agreement reached after the 1974 British miners' strike. The Board told the British public that they intended to close 20 coal mines and privatize the previously nationalized industry. At least twenty thousand jobs would be lost, and many communities in the north of England and in Wales would lose their primary source of employment. The Thatcher government had prepared against a repeat of the earlier successful 1974 industrial action by stock-piling coal.

David Peace, a British crime novelist, was a teen at the time who lived in the region of Britain most affected by the strike. He became known to the British and US crime fiction reading public with his series of four books about the Yorkshire Ripper—a British serial murderer. These four books, known as the Red Riding Quartet, are as much about police corruption and criminality as they are about the serial murders. Cops on the take. Cops running prostitution rings and pornography outfits. A police chief that tells his select group of officers that since there will always be vice, then the cops should be the ones that control it. Murders of prostitutes and criminal opposition and the destruction of witnesses' lives. False arrests and frameups. There are no redeeming characters that survive in Peace's Quartet—only the most corrupt and evil. It is a bleak look at human life in the twilight of British capitalism and a despairing prediction of a future many of us now inhabit.

Maggie Thatcher was the Prime Minister than and her ruthless disregard for human life that did not serve her intended resurrection of capitalism and empire in colors that bled toward the fascist National Front is the underpinning of Peace's work. If there was one political event besides the ongoing trouble in northern Ireland (including the H Block prison situation, many spectacular bombings by the IRA and provocateurs posing as IRA, and the growth of the Protestant paramilitaries), it was the aforementioned miner's strike. Of course, Peace wrote a novel about the strike. It is a novel that reads best with Elvis Costello's first two albums, Billy Bragg's War and Peace EP, and maybe something by The Smiths playing in the background.

That book, titled GB84, is nothing short of stunning. Told in two parallel narratives, its portrayal of corruption, political machinations, and corporate and government heartlessness makes the desperate situation of the miners and their union superreal. One strain of the narrative is told by a striking union miner who details the lives of men on strike who lose their homes, their wives, their children, jobs and dignity. The other strain is the story of the union leadership, its government counterpart, and various police and corporate operatives that operate in different levels of secrecy. Some are M15 and some are private contractors with ties to the National Front. Some are double agents whose final allegiance lies with the government of the ultraright Maggie Thatcher. Like the Quartet, there are ambiguities in the story, but only in as much as there are ambiguities in real life. Interpretation, after all, is a part of the whole.

GB84 is about the savagery of capitalism. Jackboots and legalized police beatings of unarmed strikers. Secret hit squads and government/corporate sponsored organizations of police pretending to be miners whose job is to convince the strikers to scab. Democratic forms and fascist realities. The war of the super rich against the workers. This is David Peace at his best. There is no beauty here. Some of the union officials demand sacrifices of their members while they secretly hole away funds for a future after the union's demise. It is these leaders' distance from the travails of the members and their proximity to the slime intent on profit at the workers' expense that corrupts them. Indeed, it is as if they cannot help themselves as they fall into the abyss of selfish concern for their own future while the union crumbles under the onslaught of big time capitalists and their governmental conspirators whose ruthlessness knows no bounds.

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... one interesting factoid is that well over half of China's rolling stock does nothing but transport coal around the country.

i saw that some campus physical plant, i think MIT, has a bunch of clear plastic tubes out in the sun, filled with algae and water. they drain off some algae every day and water it down, as CO2 bubbles up into it.

How about like a jillion of those on all the filthy coal machines? You get the carbon right back.
--
Hongpong.com

Photo of a mountaintop removal operation in the Appalachians

It's the one environmental crime that no US politician will confront – the destruction of Kentucky's mountains. Leonard Doyle visits the Appalachian peaks being blasted by Big Coal

Tuesday, 20 May 2008

Independent - The road slicing through the thickly forested hills of eastern Kentucky used to be called the Daniel Boone Parkway. It was named for the controversial American folk hero who fought his way across Indian country to settle a state where many of his descendants still live.

That was before the coal industry began blowing up the Appalachian Mountains as a cheap way of getting at the black stuff below, behaviour decried by the environmental group Appalachian Voices as "one of the greatest human rights and environmental tragedies in America's recent history".

Daniel Boone's road is now the Hal Rogers Parkway, named after one of the Kentucky coal industry's closest friends in Washington, a Republican Congressman of 34 years. It passes through a mountain range older than the Himalayas and is blanketed in broadleaf forests rivalled only by the Amazon basin in its biodiversity.

But the canopy of trees which lines the parkway as it rises from the bluegrass horse country to the mountains is a trompe l'oeil. The lush forest gives way to scraggly trees along the ridge-line, and behind those trees is evidence of unspeakable ecological violence. In a process known as mountaintop removal an upland moonscape is being created, which is incapable of regenerating trees. As far as the eye can see, the land is grey and pockmarked with huge black lakes, filled with toxic coal slurry.

This has come about because of America's insatiable appetite for cheap coal to generate electricity, a process enthusiastically backed by the Bush administration as it tries to displace the consumption of imported oil. And the Democrats are little better. They control Kentucky and neither Barack Obama nor Hillary Clinton have dared to challenge "King Coal" while campaigning.

The devastation being wrought on Appalachia is best appreciated from the air. An organisation called Southwinds offers people an eagle-eye view of the carnage, not readily appreciated from the road. Another way to see what's going on behind the ridge-line is to take a Google Earth virtual tour of an online memorial to the 470 mountains blown up and levelled in recent years.

The act of destroying a million-year-old mountain has several distinct stages. First it is earmarked for removal and the hardwood forest cover, containing over 500 species of tree per acre in this region, is bulldozed away. The trees are typically burnt rather than logged, because mining companies are not in the lumber business. Then topsoil is scraped away and high explosives laid in the sandstone. Thousands of blasts go off across the region every day, blowing up what the mining industry calls "overburden".

The rubble is then tipped into the valleys – more than 7,000 have already been filled – and more than 700 miles of rivers and streams have disappeared under rubble and thousands more soiled with toxic waste.

The process has accelerated wildly under George Bush. His pro-business-at-any-price credo led to the tossing out of strict federal restrictions against dumping mining rubble within 250 feet of a mountain stream. The toxic spoil laden with heavy metals, which results from blowing up mountains, was renamed "fill", enabling the mining companies to use the cheapest method possible of disposing of it. Once the rock is blown up and the coal separated out, the flattened mountaintops can only support a thin cover of grass. Tens of thousands of acres of mountain have been transformed in this way in Kentucky, West Virginia and Virginia.

Deep in the Kentucky woods McKinley Sumner's yapping dachshund was no match for the mine company's bulldozer. It arrived unannounced on Mr Sumner's land earlier this year and was soon snapping off full-grown trees as if they were twigs.

Mr Sumner, in his seventies, recalls putting on his high-top boots "because the copperheads and rattlesnakes were still out" and hotfooting it up the small mountain at the back of his house, to confront the miners by himself.

By the time he had shooed them off what he calls the "Sumner estate", all 93 acres of it, and had obtained a restraining order against the mining company the damage was done. The forest his parents had started homesteading in the 1930s, and which he has worked since he was a boy, had been devastated by the blade of the bulldozer. Trees were piled one on top of the other and all the topsoil had been shoved into the valley below.

With the help of a lawyer and a social justice organisation called Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, Mr Sumner won his court battle and the mining company was ordered to repair the damage to his land. Instead of doing what the court has ordered, the company is trying to break him in other more subtle ways. Mr Sumner's lands have been listed in the local paper every one of the past five weeks as earmarked for "mountaintop removal", something he has never agreed to.

Company executives have put the word out that he is "holding up mining in the area", setting him against the coal mining families in the area. Strange people showed up on his land to remove the markers of a land survey, which cost $6,000, in order to delineate his hillside from a neighbour's, which has been approved for mountaintop removal.

"I feel just awful," Mr Sumner, said. "We live in a democracy and this is not supposed to happen in a democracy. They are taking our rights away from us."

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