When President Trump announced plans to scrap his predecessor’s “Clean Power Plan,” we thought of Hugh Morton.
Morton, a Wilmington native famous as the proprietor of Grandfather Mountain, spent much of his later years campaigning against acid rain, which was scarring and stunting trees in North Carolina’s mountains and killing trout and other wildlife.
That rain, of course, was caused by emissions from coal-fired power plants in the Midwest, blowing east onto the Appalachian mountains. Morton was one of North Carolina’s foremost free enterprisers, but he understood that pollution had a price.
Morton also took photos in 1948 when thousands of residents of Donora, Pennsylvania, trapped in a “death smog,” were evacuated for a week to Wilmington and Wrightsville Beach. (View those photos at http://bit.ly/MortonSN.)
The smog was caught by an inversion layer that gathered up tons of pollution from (you guessed it) coal burning.
Some people don’t learn, or forget fast. President Trump, who courted votes from depressed coal-belt counties in Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia, wants to make America coal-dependent again.
As more than one observer has pointed out, that’s not really going to happen. Power plant emissions have been dropping since 2005, not because of tree-hugging Washington bureaucrats, but because of capitalism.
Natural gas is not only cleaner than coal, it’s cheaper — even if the chimeric promise of “clean coal” is ever reached. Electric companies are buying gas and, to a lesser extent, solar and wind power. The number of coal-fired power plants has dropped from 619 in 1005 to 427 a decade later. Older ones will probably be replaced over time.
Even Robert Murray, the CEO of the nation’s largest coal company said none of this will bring coal jobs back.
Even so, Trump’s energy plan — which includes opening federal lands to coal mining by private interests, cutting the Environmental Protection Agency’s staff by 3,200 positions and all but banning the mention of “climate change” by federal agencies — still takes America in the wrong direction.
China, choking on its own smog, has capped coal production and moved to become the world leader in producing wind turbines. Its social policies are focusing on retraining coal miners in new technologies.
Trump, however, seems to be leading America backward to some imagined golden age when men were men and, gee, our old LaSalle ran great.
And he’s not alone. Up in Raleigh, two Republican House members want to repeal a decade-old law setting targets to raise the amount of electricity that public utilities, electric membership corporations and municipalities get from renewable sources such as wind and solar. It’s as if renewable energy is somehow unpatriotic.
Face it: The “jobs” are mythical, but the impact isn’t. The EPA’s own estimates showed the Clean Power Plan, by further lowering emissions, could have prevented 1,700 heart attacks, 90,000 asthma attacks and 300,000 lost workdays and school days annually.
And that’s not even getting into the issue of carbon emissions that heat oceans, melt glaciers and ice caps and cause the sea level to rise. We’re on pretty low land.
Environmental groups are squawking about this, and voters should be squawking along with them.
