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| Coal (photo from Scientific American) |
In a quiet story noted in Bloomberg News, the Environmental Protection Agency "proposed limits on greenhouse-gas emissions from U.S. power plants." The EPA's apparent intent is to eliminate the construction of any new, coal-fired facilities and to encourage the use of natural gas.
Both sides of the proposition generate controversy. Coal-fired plants unquestionably contribute particularly nasty forms of air pollution. Ruinous coal mining techniques degrade the terrestrial environment. Meanwhile, domestic supplies of natural gas have become plentiful, partly through hydraulic fracturing, a/k/a "fracking." Concerns have been raised about fracking's deleterious environmental impact, suspected contribution to a sharp increase in earthquakes in previously seismically quiet zones, and use as financial blackmail in economically depressed regions.
The EPA, effectively closed during the Bush-Cheney years, faces an American public conditioned to dislike "government interference" and to accept corporate preferences, regardless of health or environmental impact. The anti-EPA crowd does not want to recall the bad old days, when major metro area air quality was hopeless, when mining interests disfigured wide swaths of the American West, and when the nation's waterways were rivers of shit.
Who would want a return to filthy Los Angeles air, a desecrated Great American Desert, or a revolting Schuylkill River in Philadelphia?
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