Duke Energy Wants to Have Its Cake and Eat It, Too. And They Want to Have Your Cake and Eat It Too, Too

Sorry about that coal ash spill thingy. You folks don't mind paying for it now, do you?

This news item has my head spinning. In a move that goes way beyond having unmitigated gall, Duke Energy, whose spill of between 50,000 and 82,000 tons of coal ash fouled North Carolina’s Dan River last month, now says that the power company’s customers should pick up the bill to clean up the company’s dozens of coal ash storage sites.

            Lynn Good, Duke Energy’s CEO, told the Charlotte Observer that since rate payers had enjoyed the electricity the company provided for generations they are the ones who should pay for the cleanup of the byproduct of producing that electricity.

            OK, so I sell you a guitar. Years later, due to my bad business practices, I incur debts. I then tell you that since you bought a guitar and benefited from my bad business practices, you should pay my bills. That is exactly what Duke is trying to do here. They want to have their cake and eat it, too. And they want to have your cake and eat it too, too.

Hat tip to my friend Amy for this story.

Fourth Poisonous Spill in Appalachia This Year

So now there is a second toxic spill in North Carolina's Dan River from the decommissioned Duke Energy power plant. So how many toxic spills have gone into the waters of Appalachia this year? Four?

            And it’s only February.

Coal ash in the streams now a common sight in Appalachia?

More Bad Water-and Bad Business and Bad Politics-in Appalachia

The days, weeks, and yes, the months are passing by and still the drinking water in southern West Virginia remains questionable. Schools were in session yesterday, though it was Presidents’ Day. Even still, students at Grandview Elementary School in North Charleston were sent home early after teachers at the school said that they smelled the licorice smell characteristic of the 4-methylcyclohexane methanol that was spilled into the Elk River, a source of drinking water for 300,000 West Virginians, back in January. Students at the school complained of headaches.

            West Virginians have poisoned water, but at least they have been warned off by the licorice smell. North Carolinians have no instant way to tell if their water is fouled. The toxic mercury, lead, selenium, and arsenic that wound up in their water as a result of the coal ash spill in the Dan River on the third of this month don’t readily give off tell-tale fumes when they have reached toxic levels in drinking water. So should they trust state regulators and business executives when they tell their state lawmakers that their water is safe to drink? Seriously, would you feel safe drinking the water that came out of the Dan River?

            And in a typical George W. Bush type of delaying tactic—the 43^rd president repeatedly said that legislation and action on global warming should commence once more research had been performed—North Carolina state legislators said that they lacked sufficient information to do anything and months would pass before solutions to the problem became clear to them.

            Tons and tons of toxic coal ash poured into one of your rivers. Coal ash has been around since people started burning the fossil fuel; folks have known about lead and arsenic being toxic for hundreds, even thousand of years; and you need a few more months to get clear on this topic?

            The New York Times has a pretty good take on things in North Carolina. As I touched on the cozy relationship between utilities and North Carolina regulators before, the NYT editorial board notes how the state protected Duke Energy in three lawsuits brought by environmental groups over the company’s coal ash storage facilities. In light of the disasters in West Virginia and North Carolina, the National Geographic asks appropriately if the water is good to drink in the rest of the country. After all, it is not only coal ash and 4-methylcyclohexane methanol to poison our rivers and streams. CAFOs (Confined Animal Feeding Operations) can put things like coliform and e-coli in water. Click here and you’ll see the number of these meat factories that dot the land just in Ohio.

 

When you get a whole bunch of livestock in one place like this, the rain can create runoff problems big time photo naturalgrocers.com

And this story intrigued me. The Jewish community of Charleston has responded to the water crisis in their city, and yet they admit that their response is not as vibrant as what you might expect from a similar temple or synagogue in another city. It seems that no matter what, whether you attend a church, synagogue, mosque, living in the Mountain State saps folks of their sense of community.

The Winners and Losers in Appalachia

It looks like somebody at least is doing his job when it comes to the toxic spill in North Carolina. The United States Attorney’s Office in Raleigh, North Carolina issued grand jury subpoenas to Duke Energy, the company that owns and ran the retired power plant that spilled between 50,000 and 82,000 tons of coal ash into the Dan River, and the North Carolina Department of Environment and Natural Resources.

            The subpoenas are asking for emails, memos, and reports related to the spill that occurred nearly two weeks ago. The subpoenas also want information on the state of North Carolina’s oversight of Duke Energy’s 30 other coal ash dumps.

            It turns out that environmental groups had tried to force Duke to clear out leaky coal ash dumps, suing the energy company under terms of the Clean Water Act. In every case, the state of North Carolina blocked the lawsuits. Do you think that the subpoenas have anything to do with this?

            One of the most graphic and sickening pieces of journalism on mountaintop removal is published today over at businessinsider.com. Rightly, they identify this destruction as a product of addiction, our addiction to cheap coal. WARNING: these are graphic and disturbing images. You might think twice before clicking.

            The same website also examines the paradox that is mountaintop removal. Even while billions of tons of coal are being dug out of the mountains of Appalachia, coal jobs have sharply declined in the last couple of years. The article cites the booming of gas production, which is true in this case, as well as environmental regulation, which is false in this regard, as the causes of the downturn.  Quoted in the article is Luke Popovich, a spokesman for the National Mining Association. He says, “There's a gross inconsistency, in our view, of this administration's insistence that it wants to create high-wage jobs and more of them, and the reality that their policies are having on the employment marketplace.”

This is regulated, Mr. Popovich?

The canard of environmental regulation reducing coal jobs is risible. If you had the fortitude to click on the images of mountaintop mining, you can easily see that environmental regulation of this type of mining is nonexistent. As West Virginia Senator Jay Rockefeller recently told NPR, when it comes to coal and West Virginia, he says, “So the industries always win, the people always lose.”

OOPS! Sorry, You're Water's Not Safe To Drink After All

North Carolina officials said water from the Dan River was safe to drink.

This sounds familiar. A toxic is spilled in a river; residents are warned about drinking the water; later officials declare that the water is safe to drink; then, big surprise, the water is found to still be poisonous.

            This scenario played itself out in southern West Virginia this past month, where a chemical spill poisoned the drinking water for 300,000 residents. The water was declared unsafe, then safe, then unsafe again. Now the very same story is playing itself out in North Carolina, where a leak spilled between 50,000 and 82,000 tons of coal ash into the Dan River last week. Coal ash contains arsenic, lead, mercury, and selenium, all of which are toxic. Officials in North Carolina declared the water safe to drink on the third of this month, the day on which the coal ash spill had initially occurred. The officials now confess that the water was still toxic when they had declared it safe for drinking, saying that their erroneous nihil obstat for the water was due to “an honest mistake.”

            Well, well, well, “an honest mistake.” When they say this, do they think that it makes it OK? “Sorry, folks. We made a little goof about your drinking water. Hope it’s no biggie.” Is that what they are saying? From this LA Times story, it doesn’t seem like anybody is particularly contrite. It doesn’t seem like anybody’s job is on the line for his or her “honest mistake.”

            I guess I’ll side with Senator Jay Rockefeller, who admits that after working with the coal companies for decades, he doesn’t trust them in the slightest. Officials in West Virginia say the water is safe, but Rockefeller says that he’s not drinking it.

Do We Trust the Water? And Frank Words From Senator Jay Rockefeller

It seems that there is more confusion than anything else when it comes to the toxic spills in Appalachia. A month after the Freedom Industries spilled a large amount of 4-methylcyclohexane methanol, a chemical that is used to “clean” coal before shipping, into the Elk River in Charleston, West Virginia, poisoning the drinking water for 300,000 residents, the word from the Center For Disease Control was that the water is now safe to drink. Yet some schools are still closed. Two schools were closed Wednesday and Thursday due to the persistence of a licorice smell coming from the schools’ water supply. One student went to the hospital after complaining of burning eyes, and a teacher was taken to the hospital after the teacher fainted.

            It’s kind of the same story in North Carolina. An international group of water advocates testing the water of the Dan River, which received between 50,000 and 82,000 tons of coal ash residue from a retired Duke Energy power plant, said the river showed, “extremely high levels of arsenic, chromium, iron, lead and other toxic metals typically found in coal ash,” while Duke Energy claims that tests by the company and North Carolina officials indicated no adverse effect on the water supply from the river.

            I guest I know whom I would trust in this case.

            I don’t quite know what to think of this story from Politico about Jay Rockefeller, who served as West Virginia’s governor from 1977 through 1985 and has served as the Mountain State’s senator for the past 20 years (now retiring).

Frank words from Senator Rockefeller: Now that he's retiring, can he voice what he really thinks? photo AP

At a hearing of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee’s water subcommittee Rockefeller had some unexpectedly frank words concerning the spill in the Elk River and Appalachia in general. He lamented the characteristic fatalism that runs through the deepest parts of the Appalachian Mountains that perversely has people delighting in the hardships foisted on them by outside business interests. And he paired this fatalism with what he called an “Appalachian myth,” which is “the idea that somehow God has it in his plan to make sure that industry is going to make life safe for them.”

            These words seem contradictory fatalism paired with a sense of blessedness, that the Good Lord somehow considered the folks of Appalachia special and His providence will work things out for these hardworking yet unlucky people. Having spent his entire adult life representing West Virginia, Rockefeller will tell you that these seemingly contradictory traits are two sides of the same twisted psychological coin that he rightly identifies with the remnants of the Scotch-Irish who had been the original white settlers throughout West Virginia.”

            Rockefeller again hits the nail on the head when he goes on to say that this mythology, that “somehow God has it in his plan to make sure that industry is going to make life safe for them,” is not true. He goes on to say:

Industry does everything they can and gets away with it almost all the time, whether it’s the coal industry, not the subject of this hearing, or water or whatever. They will cut corners, and they will get away with it. The world is as it is; we accept the world as it is. And the point is you don’t accept the world as it is, but as it should be, and you make it in that posture. I’m just—I’m here angry, upset, shocked, embarrassed that this would happen to 300,000 absolutely wonderful people, who, you know, work in coal mines and that stuff, but they’re depending on the fruit of the land, wherever it may be, for survival. They’re making it, but barely.

The fatalism of West Virginia, and indeed much of Appalachia, spread through the hillsides and hollers of that region long before Jay Rockefeller entered that state as a Vista volunteer in the 1960s. As senator, as governor, he has been powerless to change that. And yet, it is still disheartening to hear Rockefeller confess that his many years representing my home state have not been years of good stewardship and he was unable to ameliorate the lives of his constituents despite their fatalistic view of their world.

Would You Drink the Water In Danville?

So try to swallow this. This is a photo of someone who grabbed a piece of driftwood in the Dan River, where between 50,000 to 82,000 tons of coal ash were spilled from a retired Duke Energy power plant two days ago.

This image is from 20 miles downstream of the spill and just a stone’s throw upstream of the drinking water intake in Danville, Virginia. Keep in mind that the ash contains arsenic, lead, mercury, and selenium, all of which are very toxic. Would you drink the water in Danville?

            The image is from Appalachian Water Watch. The person whose hand is covered in gray goop is Amy Adams, North Carolina Campaign Coordinator for Appalachian Voices.

Another Toxic Spill in Appalachia

There has been another coal related spill in Appalachia. This time it is coal ash, the toxic residue that is left over from the burning of coal. Coal ash contains arsenic, lead, mercury, and selenium. Today 50,000 to 82,000 tons of coal ash and up to 27 million gallons of water flowed into the Dan River near Eden, North Carolina.

The water and ash were released from ponds at a retired Duke Energy power plant through a 48-inch pipe that drained a 27-acre coal ash holding pond. Coal ash has washed up on the banks of the river and the river is now tinted gray. Water districts downstream have been notified, but no reports of water problems have cropped up yet.

Will this be another ho hum disaster? Tens of thousands of tons of toxic ash drains into a river. I think that’s a big deal.

Danger: It's More Than Obamacare on the Chopping Block For the GOP

The political blackmail that the GOP is using, that of threatening a government shutdown in order to render the new healthcare legislation toothless by defunding it, has been the headline grabbing news over the last couple of weeks and has only intensified over the last few days. But there is more to the shenanigans that the Grand Old Party is up to.

            The Republicans are now using the mechanism of raising the debt ceiling as a way to give away a wish list to big oil, King Coal, and other industries. According to the New York Times, GOP leaders sent to their rank and file a laundry list of provisions they want attached to the bill to raise the debt ceiling. Besides delaying Obamacare and limits on malpractice, the wish list includes such anti-environmental provisions as giving a green light to the construction of the Keystone pipeline, more offshore oil and gas drilling, more permitting of oil and gas exploration on federal lands, rolling back regulation on coal ash, and blocking the EPA’s new regulations on greenhouse gas production.

            Wow.

            Politically, the GOP controls the House, but that is only due to some ingenious Gerrymandering that some of the states were recently able to pull off. The party of Lincoln has failed to gain the popular vote for the presidency in five of the last six elections, and the one win for the GOP was for a sitting president, George W. Bush, who barely won. This isn’t the only time that the Republican Party has become a loser. Things were so bad for them in the seventies after Nixon’s disgrace and resignation that they considered changing the name of the party.

All these latest giveaways to business and industry that the GOP is trying to work into the debt ceiling deal are, of course, all about campaign donations and money. But what they are proposing is so extreme that I sense a crazed sort of nihilism that wants to pull in and destroy what is good and great about this country while this political party experiences what may be a death spiral.

Big Business Wants to Have their Cake and Eat It, Too, and They Want to Have Your Cake and Eat It Too, Too

One of the mantras of management that I heard throughout my years of working in manufacturing was the complaint of regulations. Whether they be for worker safety or environmental concerns management considers all law and regulations to be an impediment to their ability to do business. These news stories are therefore unsurprising. What is curious is the manner in which business is trying to play it both ways to get what they want.

In West Virginia, politicians from both parties rail against the federal government, particularly the restrictions that the EPA places on them to ensure that there is a modicum of clean water for the wildlife in the streams and for the people to drink.

            In this latest move, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Coal Residuals Reuse and Management Act of 2013 (H.R. 2218). The bill, which was introduced by Republican and King Coal friendly West Virginia representative David B McKinley, would allow states to set their own standards for the management and disposal of coal ash, the waste product that is left over when coal is burned. Coal ash has a number of uses, such as the production of concrete. But much coal ash from coal-fired power plants is dumped into landfills. According to the EPA, an average coal-fired power plant, one producing 500 to 1,000 megawatts, would create a landfill of between 74 to 148 acres of coal ash refuse. The National Mall in Washington D.C. is about 148 acres, just to give you some perspective on the size of these landfills. The coal ash is also toxic, containing arsenic, lead, mercury, and selenium. Theses large dumps of coal ash can therefore pollute runoff and groundwater.

            The dumping of coal ash is unregulated right now, but in the last few years the EPA has proposed rules that would govern the dumping of this industrial byproduct. The Coal Residuals Reuse and Management Act would essentially negate any coal ash rules from the EPA, leaving it up to the states to set standards for its disposal. Essentially, if H.R. 2218 passes, it would maintain the status quo of unregulated coal ash disposal. State regulation is weak to nonexistent.

            OK, so we have industry wanting to keep federal regulation at bay and maintain state regulation of the byproducts of their business. But business can’t merely keep things going on a one-way street. According to the L.A. Times, lobbyists in Washington want the federal government to step in and keep states from enforcing laws that have higher standards than the federal standards. In the crosshairs of industry is California, which has some higher standards for consumer protection, workplace safety, and environmental protection than the rest of the country.

            States can set higher standards than federal regulations, but the fly in the ointment here is the federal ability to regulate interstate commerce. GOP member of Congress say that they want to curb the progressive regulation of California to protect the rights of states whose industries don’t want to be faced with complying with California’s standards or to be cut off from the Golden State’s market, the largest in the country.

            Targeted by industry lobbyists are California laws to restrict toxic chemicals, a law that mandates that chickens on industrial farms have enough room to spread their wings, a ban on cutting fins off sharks to make soup, and a state law protecting an endangered fish. This sort of maneuver takes one of the bedrocks of conservative thinking, that the states can serve as individual laboratories to test new ideas before they might be adopted by the greater Union, and defenestrates it down a legislative and philosophical window in the service of big business. Everybody knows we can't have California making laws that enable sharks to hold onto their fins. What if the good state of Vermont wants to make a whole bunch of shark fin soup?

            So there you have it. Big business likes the federal government when the states get in their way, and big business likes the states when the federal government threatens to be too strict. Are there any principles here? I didn't think so.