King Coal's Weakening Grip on Power.

The fuel that ushered in the Industrial Revolution still burns, but a new era beckons.

Revolution was literally in the air on February 28, 1998, when officials in Beijing and 32 other Chinese cities under pressure from the national environmental protection agency - began releasing pollution records that had been suppressed for 20 years. The weekly reports - intended to enable the public to supervise the government's anti-pollution efforts" - revealed that the air outside Beijing's Gate of Heavenly Peace had become hellish. Prolonged exposure to the air posed serious health risks and had increased the city's death rate by 4 percent, according to research from Harvard and Beijing Medical Universities.

The news rocked Beijing, and media reports generated angry outcries from citizens who discovered that the haze hovering over their city - and its related health problems - were almost entirely the result of coal, which supplies 80 percent of the city's energy use for factories, power plants, ovens, and stoves. A few months later, in response to public pressure, city authorities announced a crackdown on coal burning, with the aim of banning it by the end of the century. Beginning with the city's 42-square-mile central limits, the government plans to establish coal-free zones, with local authorities helping residents switch from coal to cleaner-burning natural gas.

Beijing's move to banish what was known as "King Coal" in the nineteenth century in the United States and Europe illustrates how perceptions of this fossilized substance have changed over time. A thousand years ago, China fired coal in blast furnaces to produce the armor and arrowheads that defended its dynasties against outside invaders. But it was in the West that coal was first burned in massive amounts, beginning in the eighteenth century. If the Industrial Revolution was "Prometheus unbound," coal was the fire stolen from the gods that made it possible. With its production paralleling the rise of national powers, this fossil fuel became synonymous with wealth and modernity in the nineteenth century. In his classic 1865 work, The Coal Question, economist William Jevons went as far as to predict the collapse of the British Empire as its coal mines approached depletion.

But Prometheus paid clearly for his deed; chained to a mountaintop, he had his liver torn out daily by vultures. Likewise, the reign of King Coal has not been without heavy costs: its use has left a legacy of human and environmental damage that we have only begun to assess. At the close of the twentieth century, coal's smog-choked cityscapes are no longer the symbol of industrial opportunities and wealth that they were 100 years ago. Instead, coal is increasingly recognized as a leading threat to human health, and one of the most environmentally disruptive human activities.

Indeed, the sun may be setting on the empire of coal. Its share of world energy, which peaked at 62 percent in 1910, is now 23 percent and dropping. Although coal's market price has fallen 64 percent in the past 20 years to a historical low of $32 per ton, global use is at its lowest in a decade, having fallen 2.1 percent in 1998. One reason for this decline is that the price of dealing with coal's health and environmental toll - the "hidden cost" - is rising. And now King Coal's remaining colonies find themselves confronted with a concern of the sort that bedeviled Jevons. This time, however, it is coal dependence - not depletion - that is the potential threat to progress.

Even so, the mirage of coal as a source of cheap energy continues to be a powerful lure, and many countries have gone to great lengths to rationalize their reliance - suppressing information, compartmentalizing problems, or socializing costs. Until now, the problems of coal have been treated with an "emergency room" approach: ecological impacts have been addressed pollutant by pollutant, mine by mine; the health hazards, one urban crisis at a time. This narrow approach has been an expensive one, both economically and environmentally, and has had perverse, unforeseen consequences: each time one of coal's impacts is "mitigated," a more pervasive and chronic problem is created, exacerbating and spreading the fuel's negative effects out over space and time. For example, towering smokestacks, built to alleviate local air pollution, created the problem of acid rain. And efforts to curtail acid rain, in turn, are adding to greenhouse-gas emissions.

Increasingly, human health, ecological, climatic, and socioeconomic concerns are pushing us away from this piecemeal regulation - toward an end to the "end-of-pipe" approach. But for the world to judge whether continued dependence on coal is viable, a more comprehensive examination is in order. After centuries of treating coal like a first-time offender, there is a growing consensus that it is time to assess this fossil fuel in terms of its cumulative offenses and to seriously weigh the benefits of replacing it with cleaner, and ultimately cheaper, alternatives.

Exhibit A: Health Hazard

The solid blackish substance called coal is vegetation that has, over millions of years, accumulated in wetlands and been partially decomposed, suffocated, moisturized, compressed, and baked by the Earth's inner heat underground. During this process, unfathomable quantities of organic matter have been slowly broken down and stored. The act of extracting coal from the Earth's crust and burning it is an experiment without geological precedent, and it is altering the environment in profound, yet poorly understood, ways.

Coal has long been linked to air pollution and iii effects on health. In medieval London, an official proclamation banned coal burning as early as 1306 A.D. in an unsuccessful effort to curb the smog and sulfurous smell hanging over the city. Even today particulate matter (dust, soot, and other solid airborne pollutants) and sulfur are two of the most unhealthy by-products of coal combustion.

Particulates penetrate deep into lungs. Prolonged inhalation causes a range of respiratory and cardiovascular problems, such as emphysema, asthma, bronchitis, lung cancer, and heart disease. It is also linked to higher infant mortality rates. The smallest particles can stay in an individual's lungs for a lifetime, potentially increasing the risk of cancer. Sulfur dioxide ([SO.sub.2]) exposure is associated with increased hospitalization and death from pulmonary and heart disease, particularly among asthmatics and those with existing breathing problems.

These pollutants made up the "coal smogs" that killed 2,200 Londoners in 1880; the "killer fog" that caused 50 deaths in Donora, Pennsylvania in 1948; and the "London fog" that took 4,000 lives in 1952. Today, several coal-dependent cities - including Beijing and Delhi - are approaching the pollution levels of the Donora and London disasters, and the world's ten most air-polluted cities - nine in China, one in India - are all heavy coal users. Worldwide, particulate and [SO.sub.2] pollution cause at least 500,000 premature deaths, 4 to 5 million new cases of bronchitis, and millions of other respiratory illnesses per year. Such smogs have become transcontinental travelers: large dust clouds of particulates and sulfur from Asian coal now reach the U.S. West Coast.

Coal burning also releases nitrogen oxides, which react in sunlight to form ground-level ozone. In the United States and Europe, more than 100 cities are exposed to unhealthy ozone levels. Beijing, Calcutta, and Shanghai - all heavily coal dependent - expose millions of children to deadly mixes of particulates, sulfur dioxide, and nitrogen oxides.

Coal smoke contains potent carcinogens, affecting the more than i billion rural poor who rely on the fuel for cooking. Rural indoor air pollution from such cooking accounts for 1.8 of 2.7 million global annual deaths from air pollution, with women and children most at risk. In rural China, exposure to coal smoke increases lung cancer risks by a factor of nine or more.

Coal can also contain arsenic, lead, mercury, and fluorine - toxic heavy metals that can impair the development of fetuses and infants and cause open sores and bone decay. In rural China, where 800 million people use coal in their homes for cooking and heating, thousands of cases of arsenic poisoning, and millions of cases of fluorine poisoning have been reported. Millions of rural poor in other developing countries face similar risks.

Coal mining and extraction pose health hazards, as well. Explosions, falls, and hauling accidents injure or kill several thousand coal miners in China, Russia, and Ukraine each year. In China, more than five miners die for every million tons of coal mined. Perhaps the most serious and chronic threat to miners is pneumoconiosis, or "black lung" - a condition caused by continued inhalation of coal dust, which inflames, scars, and discolors lungs, and leads to a debilitating decline in lung function. In the United States, enough was known at the turn of the twentieth century about black lung to have spurred preventive action to remove or lessen the effects of the disorder, writes Alan Derickson, author of Black Lung: Anatomy of a Public Health Disaster. But company doctors misdiagnosed or concealed the illness for more than 50 years, until medical community mavericks and the largest strike in U.S. history forced law- makers to enact compensatory and preventive measures. By then, the lives of hundreds of thousands of coal miners had been shortened. U.S. taxpayers have since paid more than $30 billion to compensate mining families.

Despite these advances, coal dust continues to plague miners. In Russia and Ukraine, official estimates range from 200 to 500 deaths per year. In China, where 2.5 million coal miners are exposed to dust diseases, the current annual death toll of 2,500 is expected to increase by 10 percent each year. Even in the United States, 1,500 miners died of black lung in 1994, and under-reporting is still prevalent.

Exhibit B: Environmental Damage

The coal smogs in Donora and London sparked public outrage, leading to the enactment of the first major clean-air laws. Setting local air quality standards, these acts prompted industries to install high smokestacks that would spread the pollutants over larger areas and to more distant regions. In parts of the United States, some smokestacks shot up higher than the top floor of the Empire State Building.

But this simple solution for local pollution had an unintended consequence. Carried aloft, nitrogen oxides and sulfur dioxide react in the atmosphere to form acids that fall as rain, snow, or fog or turn to acid on direct contact - corroding buildings and monuments and damaging vegetation, soils, rivers, lakes, and crops. The problems of acid rain and deposition surfaced first in Norwegian fish kills in the 1960s, and later in the "forest death" of Germany, the "Black Triangle" of dead trees in Central Europe, and the dying lakes and streams of the U.S. Adirondacks - all traced to coal burning hundreds of miles away.

Under pressure from environmental groups, industrial nations have addressed acid rain through an array of agreements focusing on sulfur emissions, which have been significantly reduced. But nitrogen emissions, which initially escaped regulation, have been slower to drop. In fact, in many regions they have risen, offsetting reductions made in sulfur emissions. In Europe, forest decline continues and hundreds of acid-stressed lakes face a long recovery time, as nitrogen persists well above tolerable levels. High-elevation forests in West Virginia, Tennessee, and Southern California are near saturation level for nitrogen, and high-elevation lakes in the Rocky Mountain, Cascade, and Sierra Nevada mountain ranges arc on the verge of chronic acidity. In the Adirondacks, many waterways are becoming more acid even as sulfur deposits drop: by 2040, as many as half the region's 2,800 lakes and ponds may be too acid to support much life.

The West's acid deposition debacle is now replicating with potentially greater repercussions in Asia. A haze the size of the United States covers the Indian Ocean in winter, and in summer is blown inland and falls as acid rain, reportedly reducing Indian wheat yields. Acid rain falls on over 40 percent of China, and in 1995 caused $13 billion in damage to its forests and crops. Widening areas of China, India, South Korea, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam are above critical levels of sulfur. Buildings, forests, and farmland close to or downwind from large urban and industrial centers are being hardest hit. Thousand-year-old sculptures from China's Song Dynasty have been corroded. And some scientists believe the Taj Mahal is in similar danger. A fifth of India's farmland faces acidification. China's sulfur emissions may overwhelm fertile soils across China, Japan, and South Korea by 2020.

Other types of ecosystem overload, too, are linked to coal. Nitrogen overfertilizes waterways, causing deadly algal blooms. Ground-level ozone damages forests and crops. Each year, ozone costs the United States between $5 and 10 billion in crop losses alone, and cuts wheat yields in parts of China by 10 percent. The formation and burning of massive slag heaps - piles of cinder left over from combustion - degrades land and emits carbon monoxide. Acidic or highly saline runoff from mines contaminate ground and surface water.

Air pollution regulations have prompted a hunt for low-sulfur coal, with companies turning from underground to surface - also known as strip, or open-pit - mining. In Canada, open-pit mines lie at the foot of Alberta's Jasper National Park, a World Heritage Site; in India's Bihar province, they endanger huge tracts of forest. These mines have uprooted hundreds of thousands of indigenous and poor people - aborigines in Australia, Native Americans in Arizona, villagers in northern Germany, tribals in Raniganj, India - from land they have inhabited for centuries, often with little advance notice or compensation. In West Virginia, huge machines engage in "mountain-top removal" - stripping away dozens of rolling hills, burying streams, and bulldozing mining communities.

As many developing countries follow the path of industrial nations, they too seem unable to steer clear of the pitfalls of a simplistic response to coal pollution. But the folly of focusing solely on coal's air pollutants proves most perverse in the developing world, where the added mining and processing requirements exacerbate severe land and water constraints. Chinese enterprises commonly violate emissions standards and burn high-sulfur coal rather than pay for precious water use to wash coal. In India, citizens' groups criticize the government's coal-washing mandate, arguing that it will waste energy, use up large quantities of scarce water and land, and increase pollution at mines.

Exhibit C: Shifting Climate

The second generation of coal-related pollution laws, motivated by public concern over acid rain, led companies to install another technological quick-fix. This time "clean-coal" technologies were the promised solution, namely flue-gas desulfurization and nitrogen-control equipment. While the equipment lowered emissions of the targeted pollutants, they, like higher smokestacks, had unforeseen side-effects. Clean coal creates added water demands, produces large amounts of sludge and other solid wastes, and decreases energy efficiency, thereby increasing emissions of other compounds - including carbon dioxide (C[O.sub.2]).

Ranging from less than 20 to more than 98 percent in carbon content, coal is the most carbon-rich fossil fuel. The industrial era's heavy combustion of these fuels is short-circuiting the global carbon cycle, building up atmospheric C[O.sub.2] concentrations to their highest point in 420,000 years. The thickening blanket of these and other greenhouse gases has already trapped enough radiative heat to make the planet's surface its warmest in 1,200 years.

Many expected climatic dislocations are appearing: sea level rise; accelerating glacier retreat and ice shelf breakup; migrations and declines of forests, coral reefs, and other temperature-sensitive species; changes in the timing and duration of seasons; greater frequency and intensity of extreme weather events. Climate scenarios for the year 2050 from the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research show tropical forests turning to desert, adding more carbon to the atmosphere; malaria spreading to currently unaffected populations; an additional 30 million people at risk of hunger; another 66 million in danger of water stress; and 20 million more susceptible to flooding. Heat stress will have increased by 70 to 100 percent by then - adding several thousand deaths each year in large urban areas like New York, New Delhi, and Shanghai, according to Laurence Kalkstein of the University of Delaware.

Carbon emissions are not the only means by which coal changes climate: mining annually releases 25 million tons of methane, equal in warming potential to the United Kingdom's entire carbon output. But C[O.sub.2] is the most important contributor to climate change - and coal releases 29 percent more carbon [TABULAR DATA OMITTED] per unit of energy than oil, and 80 percent more than natural gas. The climatic impact of coal burning is disproportionate to its importance as an energy source: with a 26 percent share of world energy, it accounts for 43 percent of annual global carbon emissions - approximately 2.7 billion tons. Climate instability also compounds other coal-related problems: heat stress exacerbates urban air pollution, and higher temperatures make natural systems more vulnerable to acid rain impacts.

Stabilizing atmospheric C[O.sub.2] levels at 450 parts per million during the next century, which some scientists believe necessary to avoid far more dangerous disruptions of climate, would constrain coal use to somewhere between 200 and 300 billion tons - less than 7 percent of the total resource base. Burning the entire coal resource, on the other hand, would release 3 trillion tons of carbon into the atmosphere, five times the safe limit. Thus, while energy analysts point to the apparent size of the fuel's reserves, the amount that could be safely used is far smaller. From the perspective of balancing the carbon budget, coal is a highly limited energy source.

Despite studies showing the economic feasibility of switching from coal, several governments and industries are pursuing another end-of-pipe solution: carbon sequestration. Firms and agencies in the United States, Norway, and elsewhere are devoting millions of dollars to test technologies for separating and capturing C[O.sub.2] from fossil fuels. The C[O.sub.2] would then be locked up by injecting it into oceans, terrestrial ecosystems, and geological formations. But the potential impacts on ocean chemistry and deep-sea ecosystems have not been explored, and injected emissions could be re-released due to geological activity. And if sites subject to slow release are used, carbon management could reduce atmospheric C[O.sub.2] concentrations in the near term but increase them in the long term - adding to the climate problem.

Meanwhile, some industrial nations seeking developing-country action on climate change are, contradictorily, redirecting clean coal programs overseas. In a novel form of trade "dumping," clean-coal equipment features prominently in bilateral energy missions, with firms and officials from the United States, Japan, and Australia proselytizing to poor nations that they "need clean-coal technologies." The World Bank and European Commission have aimed clean-coal technology initiatives at developing and former Eastern bloc nations, where the technologies remain unproven. Indeed, clean-coal equipment has failed to demonstrate financial viability in the West (its high capital investment costs make it less attractive than natural-gas-fired combined-cycle turbines), linking its peddling less to economics than to the political clout of the industry.

Exhibit D: Losing Labor

"The story of coal in America," writes Duane Lockard in Coal: A Memoir and Critique, "is the story of corporate successes and excesses generally." The same can now be said for the coal industry worldwide. Shrinking profits and growing deficits are leading to drastic cost-cutting practices that translate into lower prices but also major job losses, creating an employment crisis among coal miners around the globe. It is, however, both necessary and possible to reduce reliance on coal while minimizing the displacement of workers that inevitably accompanies the decline of an industry.

Worldwide, only about 10 million coal mining jobs remain, making up one-third of all mining jobs and accounting for one-third of 1 percent of the global workforce. In industrial nations, the coal-mining industry is no longer a major employer, and employment is falling even where production or exports are rising. In developing countries and transitional economies, where employment is still relatively high, pressures to reform the industry and cut costs are causing major job dislocations.

Like other sunset industries, the coal sector is increasingly characterized by bigger and fewer companies, more and larger equipment, and less labor-intensive operations. In the United States, the 10 largest firms account for 60 percent of output, up from 35 percent a decade ago. During coal's peak, in 1924, 705,000 miners toiled in U.S. mines; today there are fewer than 82,000. Thanks mostly to surface mining, employment has declined by two-thirds over the last 20 years and is expected to continue to fall; coal miners now count for less than 0.1 percent of the nation's workforce. Though domestic consumption continues to crawl upward, exports have dropped 25 percent since 1996, and experts agree that they will never return to pre-1998 levels.

The rate of contraction has as much to do with politics as with economic and environmental factors. Coal industries in both the United Kingdom and Germany have been weakened since the 1960s by environmental regulations and the switch to cleaner natural gas, now the fuel of choice for power generation in industrial nations. But while contraction in the United Kingdom has been rapid - only 13,000 union coal miners remain, out of 1.2 million in 1978 - the decline in Germany has been more gradual, from 190,000 in 1982 to less than 90,000 today.

Similar struggles lie ahead for other coal-dependent nations. In Australia, 9,000 of the nation's 22,000 coal miners went on strike in 1997 when impending job cuts led Rio Tinto, the world's largest mining company, to try to deunionize the industry. In South Africa, coal production has risen 65 percent, but employment has fallen over 20 percent, since 1980. In India, where production has doubled since 1980, employment is still declining as a proportion of population. Poland's mines lose nearly $700 million each year. Russia has halted production in 90 mines and intends to have shut 130 of its 200 mines by 2000. Major future losses are expected in these countries as improved productivity and the shift to less energy-intensive service industries make more jobs redundant.

Cost cutting, mine closings, and job losses arc greatest in China, where Li Yi, director of the Xishan coal mining bureau, summed up the industry's prevailing philosophy in a 1998 interview: "Our motto is: Cut people, improve efficiency." The world's leading coal producer and consumer, China has lost 870,000 workers over the last five years, and slashed production by 250 million tons in 1998 due to excess capacity and rail transport bottlenecks. (Like India, Australia, and South Africa, China faces a geographic mismatch between coal reserves and energy needs.) The government plans to close down 25,800 coal mines this year - most among the 75,000 mines in township and village areas - and shut off all small, unauthorized mines. In May 1999, the government halted the issuance of permits for new coal mining projects.

The United Kingdom and China highlight both the challenges of and chances for helping workers in the transition to the post-coal era. In both, thousands of laid-off workers have blocked traffic, stopped trains, and stormed official offices. But both governments recognize that coal's heyday is over: they are shifting from coal-reliant industries like steel works to more modern sectors - such as the high-tech and tourism industries - and both are planning solar-cell manufacturing sites in mining areas, to case the transition for workers.

The Light at the End of the Tunnel

The current, emergency-room approach to coping with coal has proved so expensive, yielded such limited results, and contributed to so many environmental and health problems, that shifting to cleaner alternatives will help solve these problems at a much lower cost. Treating coal's symptoms in isolation has proved insufficient for improving human and planetary health. Fortunately, remedies are available that will allow the world to rapidly reduce the use of coal and accelerate the transition to cleaner energy sources.

Among the keys to cutting coal reliance are blocking mining and power projects through community activism, closing legislative loopholes, and reorienting coal-centric bilateral, multilateral, and multinational investment flows. But two policies are central to the "decoalonization" process: subsidy removal and energy taxation. Without them, the market will continue to deceive us into thinking coal is cheap, abundant, and irreplaceable, just when countries like China are beginning to realize how costly, limited, and unnecessary dependence on this fuel is.

Simply put, removing subsidies cuts coal consumption. Belgium, France, Japan, Spain, and the United Kingdom have collectively halved coal use since slashing or ending supports over the last fifteen years. Russia, India, and China have also made progress: China's coal subsidy rates have been more than halved since 1984, contributing to a slowing - and 5.2 percent drop in 1998 - in consumption. Opportunities exist for further reductions. Total world coal subsidies are estimated to be $63 billion, including $30 billion in industrial nations, $27 billion in the former Eastern bloc, and $6 billion in China and India. In Germany, the total is $21 billion - including direct production supports of more than $70,000 per miner.

The experience of Germany highlights the opportunities for - and obstacles to - taxing coal. A European Commission study shows that internalizing the external costs of coal from a German power plant would raise the price of power by 50 percent. Yet the government's 1998 ecological tax reform excluded coal due to industry opposition. As Ed Cohen-Rosenthal of Cornell University writes, "The question for coal miners is whether to dig in and fight or use the concern about global warming to negotiate the best deal for current members and retirees as one means of paving the way to a cleaner environment. This is a decision that only they can make and outsiders should respect their feelings. But their leverage for a negotiated outcome will never be higher than it is right now."

Digging in has predominated to date - coal labor groups underwrite skeptical "scientists" and oppose the Kyoto Protocol - though signs of reconciliation exist. In Australia, an Earthworker caucus of trade union and environmental groups is developing a plan for building solar and wind power industries. The AFL-CIO and U.S. environmental groups are crafting "worker-friendly" climate policies, like employing former miners in remediating abandoned mines. But while labor groups stress the need for "just transitions" to aid adversely affected workers, those representing coal miners appear less likely to become advocates of coal subsidy and tax reform, which could help fund such a transition, than to defend these endangered jobs to the bitter end - and at the expense of society at large.

Bold initiatives in coal taxation, meanwhile, can be found in China. The government has introduced a tax on high-sulfur coal to encourage a switch to plentiful natural gas and renewable-energy resources. Like cigarette taxes in the West, the coal levy may spread in the East; as with smoking in public places, coal use might also be banned outright where it is deemed too great a public burden to bear.

Back in Beijing, high-sulfur coal has been banned, 40 "coal-free zones" are planned, and natural-gas pipelines are under discussion. Hundreds of residents in Beijing are mobilizing through citizens' groups, such as the Global Village, to supervise implementation of the policies and raise public consciousness of the problem. The idea is catching on: four more Chinese cities - Shanghai, Lanzhou, Xian, and Shenyang - have followed suit with plans to phase out coal.

The challenge is to turn these local gains into a worldwide movement over the coming century, just as coal's negative consequences have risen from local to global during this one. A global coal phaseout has become as environmentally necessary and economically feasible as it might seem politically radical. Thirty years ago, few could have predicted the nascent anti-smoking effort would ever "go global," but it has. Coal now poses as serious a risk to our collective well-being, if not greater. If China's smoky cities can mobilize to begin eradicating the tobacco of our energy system, it is conceivable that the rest of the world's governments can as well.

Like sustainable development more broadly, achieving independence from King Coal will be no overnight coup, but a lengthy revolution. Yet the social, economic, and environmental rewards of a coal phaseout promise to be enormous. In the third millennium, societies will find themselves - to paraphrase Henry David Thoreau - rich in proportion to the coal they can afford to leave in the ground.

THIRTEEN COLONIES OF COAL, A.D.1999

King Coal s empire may be in decline, but prominent colonies still exist in former Eastern bloc and developing countries, where the fuel is a major energy source for cooking, heating, and industry. In the industrial world, coal may no longer be the primary source of energy, but several nations are heavily dependent on the fuel as a source of electricity. This map identifies nations that depend on coat for at least one-quarter of their energy supply, and lists the fuel's share of total energy and electricity use.

Coal as a percent of . . .

                     Energy     Electricity

South Africa           78           93
China                  73           75
Poland                 68           97
India                  57           73
Kazakhstan             54           72
Czech Rep.             51           73
Australia              49           79
South Korea            31           35
Ukraine                28           29
Slovakia               28           24
Denmark                27           74
Germany                25           55
United States          25           53

Seth Dunn is a research associate at the Worldwatch Institute.