This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
I drive an electric car. I sort and recycle half a ton each year to keep my refuse out of the county landfill. Any day, a study funded by Koch Industries will find I am responsible for the ruination of the American dream.
I work in civil-service which, much to the chagrin of ALEC and Grover Norquist, is ubiquitous throughout the United States. I'm a piece in the cog of big intrusive government (the bane of personal accountability and freedom). My tax rate is higher than U.S. Rep Darrell Issa, who hopes to put me in the unemployment line.
Having dispensed with ideologically charged rhetoric, I take pragmatic issue with the commentary of Charles Fausett ("Enjoy your cheap electricity," March 27). That impassioned defense of coal contains misinformation and fear. Solving the crises around U.S. energy requires optimism and courage.
Fausett argues that the Huntington (or Hunter) power plant must compete with renewable energy sources, which rely on "generous government subsidies." There are two glaring inaccuracies in this thinking: The first is that coal's leading competitor is wind and solar. The U.S. Energy Information Administration reports Utah's power generation in 2014 was 76 percent coal-based and 19 percent from natural gas. Do the math; Utah's coal-fired power is presently threatened by another fossil fuel, not by renewable energy.
The second inaccuracy is in those generous subsidies. In addition to what neo-liberals like to call "tax cuts" (subsidizing industry and corporations through temporary reductions in federal tax burdens, many of which date to the 1980s), there is a mammoth system of subsidies to the fossil fuel industry, coal in particular. Included are funding for infrastructure, loan guarantees and railroads (47 percent of tonnage on U.S. rails in 2009 was coal). A report from the National Research Council in 2013 placed the aggregate annual public subsidy to coal at $25.8 billion. The subsidy to renewables is $7.3 billion. It is counterfactual to claim that Utah coal is competing with renewable sources which have been granted unfair advantages.
There are other external costs of coal-fired energy, where the expenses balloon. Respiratory hospital admissions, congestive heart failure, chronic bronchitis, degradation/soiling of buildings and reduction in crop yields are all resultant of burning coal for power. Dr. Paul Epstein of Harvard Medical School in his report, "Mining Coal, Mounting Costs," finds that when one tallies the costs associated with extraction, transportation, processing and combustion of coal the price tag in the U.S. is between $175 billion and $500 billion annually. Joining electricity fees (paid to monstrously profitable corporations like Rocky Mountain Power) with government subsidies and degradation to public health creates something quite other than the "cheap electricity" to which Fausett refers.
As to the efficiency of renewable energy, take into account our ancient energy grid (built to distribute mainly coal-generated power) and that it must be decentralized to accommodate new energy. The $7.3 billion in annual subsidies which Fausett bemoans are insufficient and represent a missed opportunity. The 2009 stimulus which birthed those subsidies was signed into law at a time when President Obama and the Congress could have done a great deal more. This nation could have moved boldly forward at that time and with that stimulus by funding a power grid transformation and forcing banks (which had received cash infusions of roughly $1.2 trillion) to fund the projects necessary to change power generation. It is not an unlikely scenario — since the 2011 Fukishima nuclear disaster prompted German Chancellor Merkel to promote renewables that nation has gone from 6 percent wind/solar to 33 percent. Given U.S. history of innovation and fearlessness in the face of necessary industrial reform, what's with all the hand-wringing over taking coal power offline?
That a coal-fired power plant must run at full-load for efficiency's sake begs one more objection. If our methods of transformation are so passive as to create an environment in which burning more fossil fuels is a viable argument for energy efficiency then Utahns are in dire straits. The goal is not to run the Huntington and Hunter plants at part-load. The goal is to run them at zero-load. Not because we dislike "cheap electricity," but because we have to.
Here's where I run out of citations because there are too many to know where to begin. Most of the fossil fuels which are presently in the earth must remain in the earth if we are to avoid climate catastrophe. Future generations of Carbon and Emery county residents will thank you for not burning it, no matter the short-term inconveniences.
Sheldon Kirkham is a former resident of Helper and a Carbon High school alum. He resides in Taylorsville.