Friday, April 23, 2010
Carbon deaths
Given yesterday's oil rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico, just a few weeks after the terrible West Virginia coal mine explosion, I would think one of the more politically effective tracks for pursuing decarbonization would be to demand an end to a system that causes all too frequent 'carbon deaths.' However, I worry about using terminology like 'carbon deaths' to advocate for a clean energy future. On the one hand, I consider myself a proud advocate of decarbonization for the very purpose of ending the needless suffering and death created by the extraction and refining of fossil fuels. On the other hand, it seems disrespectful to ostensibly use the death of these miners to my inevitably political advantage. It's a tricky needle to thread - am I eulogizing miners whose fate could have been avoided, or am I exploiting their deaths for my own purposes? I assure everyone that I intend the former, but I can see how this tactic could be perceived as cheap and flippant, especially in a discourse already loaded with controversy. Thoughts?
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What are your thoughts on the pollution and use of heavy mineral mining in China for hybrid car batteries and certain wind fan materials?
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Any industrial activity is going to have environmental consequences, often devastating and almost always externalized by the agents in play. I'm not expert enough to comment on the relative runoff pollution caused by coal and heavy mineral mining, respectively, or their relative safety when it comes to mining conditions. Either way, we need effective and diligent government oversight so tragedies like the Massey mine explosion don't happen. But I think it's fairly obvious that a) emissions are reduced (over the long term) and b) decarbonizing the economy has the added benefit of reducing the dependence on foreign oil, reducing our trade deficit, bolstering our industrial policy and strengthening our aging infrastructure, creating jobs and competing in the next dominant economic sector: clean technology. China, Japan, Germany, South Korea and others are already on the job, and they're leaving America in the dust.
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