Tag Archives: Coal

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Mexican Drug Gangs Profit From Fossil Fuel Addiction

In his 2006 State of the Union address, President George W. Bush declared, “Here we have a serious problem: America is addicted to oil, which is often imported from unstable parts of the world.”

What President Bush didn’t say — although it was just as true — is that America is addicted to other fossil fuels, such as natural gas and coal. In fact, the three countries that together contain 84 percent of North America’s population are all fossil fuel junkies. The battle over the Keystone XL pipeline has highlighted the Canadian-U.S. carbon habit, but information about Mexico’s energy battles rarely make the news here in the States. Most stories on Mexico focus on that country’s non-metaphorical drug problems.

Over at Living on Earth, there’s an interview about the surprising (to me, anyway) link between both of these addictions — to fossil fuel and to illegal drugs.

Here’s the introduction. Follow the link below to listen to the full interview.

The state of Coahuila borders Texas and produces 95% of Mexico’s coal. (Image: Google Maps)

CURWOOD: It’s Living on Earth, I’m Steve Curwood. Illicit drugs are a wildly lucrative business for many gangs in Mexico. But at least one cartel, the Zetas Gang, has found something even more profitable - coal mining. The state of Coahuila borders Texas and produces 95 percent of Mexico’s coal. It’s also ground zero for Mexican drug cartels turned coal barons. That’s according to a recent article in Al Jazeera, written by reporter John Holman, who joins us by phone from the roadside in Mexico. John, Welcome to Living on Earth.

HOLMAN: Hello!

CURWOOD: So how is it possible that mining for coal can be more profitable than selling illegal drugs?

HOLMAN: Well one of the big things is that in Coahuila there lots of small clandestine mines called pothos. And these sorts of mines that have very little regulation - and so obviously they can have bigger turnover from gangs like the Zetas gang - and obviously miners in that state not usually very highly trained and poorly paid - so that’s another reason they could earn a lot of money from it.

CURWOOD: So these are small little clandestine mines on the side of the roads that people are working.

HOLMAN: Yes, obviously Coahuila also has its share of bigger mines; as you said, it’s responsible for 95 percent of Mexico’s coal output. These small mines as you drive through Coahuila - as I did - and you can see them on the side of the roads in the coal district. And they’re literally just some men gathered around what looks a very ropey sort of machine to lower them down into the depths of the earth and bring up that coal.

CURWOOD: So walk me through this process. Who buys this coal from the drug cartels?

via Living on Earth: Mexican Drug Gangs Turn To Coal Mining.

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The costs and benefits of EPA’s new rules on coal

Photo by Nick Humphries, via Flickr Creative Commons

The AP’s Dina Cappiello has an excellent piece out today on the impact of a controversial new EPA rule on air pollution. Here’s her lede:

WASHINGTON—More than 32 mostly coal-fired power plants in a dozen states will be forced to shut down and an additional 36 might have to close because of new federal air pollution regulations, according to an Associated Press survey.

Together, those plants — some of the oldest and dirtiest in the country — produce enough electricity for more than 22 million households, the AP survey found. But their demise probably won’t cause homes to go dark.

The fallout will be most acute for the towns where power plant smokestacks long have cast a shadow. Tax revenues and jobs will be lost, and investments in new power plants and pollution controls probably will raise electric bills.

Backers of Big Coal have long-protested similar clean-up rules, predicting economic ruin and widespread blackouts. A new rule to clean-up dirty coal? Cue the horsemen of the Apocalypse. But, as Cappiello’s investigation found, the consequences won’t be quite so dire. There are losers and winners, to be sure. But a full cost-accounting shows that these EPA regulations generally save lives and have a net economic benefit to boot. Just a few years ago, for example, as many as 30,000 Americans died prematurely every year because of particulate pollution from coal-fired power plants. In 2010, thanks to new EPA rules, that number had been reduced to slightly over 13,000.

The EPA says that the new rule would save thousands more lives annually and it would prevent, in 2016,

  • 4,500 cases of chronic bronchitis,
  • 11,000 nonfatal heart attacks,
  • 12,200 ER visits,
  • 11,000 cases of acute bronchitis,
  • 120,000 cases of aggravated asthma.

Yes, the new rule costs money. The EPA puts the price tag at nearly $11 billion in 2016. On the other hand, the health benefits from the new rule are estimated at between $59-$140 billion for 2016 — or somewhere between five and twelve times greater than the costs of the rule.

For years, opponents of “big government” and regulatory policies have relied on framing the issue as a choice between the environment and the economy. It’s a false choice, as the evidence shows. What’s good for the environment is, in this case and in many others, good for the economy.

 

 

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Congressmen Call for Hearing on the True Costs of Coal

Photo by Nick Humphries, via Flickr Creative Commons

Democratic Congressmen Henry Waxman (CA) and Bobby Rush (IL) today called on Republican committee chairs to hold hearings on the full economic costs of coal-fired power plants. The key word here is, of course, full.

Big Coal and its supporters in Congress often use the club of “expensive energy” to beat up on renewable sources such as solar power and wind. But, as Waxman and Rush state in their request letter to Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton (R-MI), a new study “finds that the economic costs of air pollution from coal-fired … power plants outweigh the economic value these sources add to the economy.” The letter was also addressed to the chairman of the Subcommittee on Energy and Power, Ed Whitfield (R-KY).

The study, Environmental Accounting for Pollution in the United States Economy, determined that economic damages caused by coal-fired power plants outweighed benefits by up to 5.6 times.

Coal-fired electrical generation only seems cheap because most of the costs don’t appear on the power bill. Instead, the full cost of coal is paid by ordinary Americans in increased health care and shortened life spans, by businesses in lost work days due to respiratory and heart-related illnesses, and by the agriculture industry in lower crop yields due to climate change.

The new study appears in the latest issue of the American Economic Review, and was co-authored by economists at Middlebury College and Yale University.

For more on the healthcare costs of coal-fired power plants, see the excellent 2010 study, The Toll From Coal, published by the Clean Air Task Force.

 

The True Cost of Coal