Coal Is Cool Again?

Even alliteratively speaking, especially in today’s antiseptic climate and environmental fervor from a significant sector of the population, “coal is cool” has a strange and unseemly crisp ring to it. Such a sentiment has not percolated much during the last ten years or longer.  To paraphrase Mark Anthony from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, I’m here not to praise coal but to bury its character into the hearts and mind of people from either side of the argument.

Coal is the dark and gloomy portrait it represents in the poor mining towns of Kentucky and Virginia and in many other places around the globe.  It is black lung, sooty and dirty.  In Charles Dickens mind, a coal in the stocking on Christmas Eve was not such a joyous gift.  In Beijing’s Summer Olympics, coal burning plants were put on short vacation to clear the air for the two-week event.  Coal had become the environmentalist’s bogeyman. Coal has been made the enemy; carbon has been taxed, regulated and declared a nuisance and a danger.  It has been made the villain of all the elements in the Periodic Table.  Coal mining meant a generational servitude, a hole that many families of miners find difficult to dig out of, a cruel pun, I know. A mining family had always been a mining family.  A son whose father is a miner, whose father was a miner, whose grandfather was a miner, had gone on over many generations. Coal represents hardship, rural and the blue collar make up of society hardly seen or paid attention to by much of the populated cities and even from the seat of government, except in times when votes are needed on election day.

What good can be said about coal?  I’ll speak for it when  only a few will; and fewer still from the progressive thinkers to give it second thoughts.  Let’s shed some light where all we see is the sheer sheen of its blackness.  We can wipe off the grime from every nook it settles on, rinse the grey sweat from every furrowed forehead of the hapless coal miner. Or blow the coal dust away from mining roads …

Coal: it is one of man’s earliest sources of energy since the discovery of fire. Coal meant heat and for over three thousand years the Chinese depended on it, more so today when its industrial development lives and dies by it.  It is understandable for people to forget that the railroad singlehandedly paved the way to the West, the life blood connecting Asia’s contiguous borders, from Burma to China to India’s rapid industrial development, etc. Although the iconic black-smoky trains are almost a thing of the past, coal still accounts for 37 per cent of tonnage moved by rail.  Coal’s dominance in the U.S. has receded to give way to cleaner fuels like natural gas but it still accounts for 33%. It is a lot more in China and India – the two leading producers and consumers of coal by a huge margin over the U.S. – but does not quite get the same negative press there.

Coal is more than any of the above. Let’s digress for a bit.  Coal is carbon, plain and simple.  Carbon is as old as the solar system and older still when we go beyond our little community of a handful of planets orbiting a medium star.  Isn’t carbon the reason coal is maligned? Is it not what everyone wants to get rid of?  Carbon, lest we forget, is the reason we are called carbon-based creatures.  It does not only fuel industry, it fuels us.  We will not have the energy to do anything without carbohydrates in our diet.  Carbon is us.  We will not have steel to cut our meat or make our skyscrapers and cars if not for carbon mixed with iron.  I know many will say, “But that is neither here nor there”.  Well, sodium in salt is not getting hammered but high salt diets contribute to two of the more serious human ailments: heart disease and hypertension.  When we think about it, salt and sugar and fat are likely to cause more ailments than carbon from coal.  Carbon filters are one of the more effective air and water cleaners. Let us not forget plants cannot be without carbon.  All fossil fuel today are reincarnated dead plants over millions of years. The carbon that was in those dead plants were alien components from dying stars billions of years ago.

Let’s have a quick review of coal’s life story. Every star is merely a ball of hydrogen. Every single second it shines, hydrogen is fused to form into helium – tremendous amount of energy is generated that a cup full of hydrogen plasma will have produced enough energy to power a small town for a year. Lithium is next to form and three steps down the evolution of the elements carbon is produced but as soon as all the star’s hydrogen runs out, more heavy elements are formed in rapid succession and in just 20 more steps of compression, iron is formed and in an instant, if the star is several times bigger than our sun, it explodes into a supernova. All of the elements are flung out into space.  The shock wave will further create all the other natural elements we know today; compressing surrounding gas and hydrogen floating around in trillion cubic miles of space that coalesce to form new stars.  Some, if not all of the stars formed will have planets orbiting them and some or a few will have left over carbon, iron, and many other elements from the last explosion to become rocky orbiters.  One such rocky but lucky planet happened to orbit the sun from a Goldilocks distance where it is not too hot, not too cold, just right for life to develop and flourish.

Regardless of your faith or belief, think carbon, with all the other elements, as a gift from God, from the Creator, a token from the universe, from nature, if you are so inclined according to your ideology or persuasion.  What is undeniable is that all that had been created cannot be destroyed; they just take on a different form, reincarnated, reformed and even reshaped to make other materials.

Carbon’s more elegant incarnation – the diamond – is coveted by all, maligned only by a handful.   It is “a girl’s best friend”, a famous song says, but today we must remind ourselves that so called “blood diamond” has killed thousands of people and enslaved a good fraction of some of Africa’s poorest population, enriched the diamond cartels, monopolized by a handful, smuggled and used in so many criminal enterprises, but there has not been the same outrage. Diamond is pure carbon. Coal is demonized, diamond is worshiped.  I merely used this extreme comparison to get the reader’s attention. Indeed diamond is not just used as an adornment because it has an industrial utility as a cutting tool and as an abrasive, so it has its uses but coal does much more, by a thousand fold.  Coal does more than sparkle, adorn fingers and ears, or hang around necks or compete with necklines. Look no further from your kitchen, your garage and the place where you work and the roads and bridges that take you there, carbon, in a manner of speaking, has its finger print in all of those places, its ubiquitous presence obscured by our nonchalance..

Coal is cool again as regulations are eased to make mining and use of coal a cleaner undertaking. Did the new administration do the right thing?  The question and similar one like it are the reasons political pundits were created and for protesters to find temporary foothold to stake their claim in the arena of public opinion. Is coal cool again?

Not to the environmentalists for sure, but to the coal miners and the coal regions of the U.S. the latest development is nothing short of salvation, liberation at the very least, especially to those in fear of losing their livelihood and hope floats once more to those laid off, who now may find themselves lining up along the corridors of the employed, once more. However, we can set aside for the moment the politics of it and the emotional outflow from one side or the other and look at this from the other perspective cited above. 

And one more thing to ponder: What if all there was to burn was firewood for heating, cooking, and all locomotives used fire logs (as indeed wood was the fuel for the early trains), will we have much of a forest left in the first twenty five years of the industrial revolution? Coal indeed saved the trees!

Not to overly praise coal but to sear into our consciousness this: from an infinite past the Creator, nature and the universe, or whomever you worship, had predestined the purpose of everything that was created – including coal.