April 10, 2008

Are we looking the wrong way?

Back in 1979, when disco was king and polyester leisure suits were in fashion, a gas station owner in sleepy Centralia, Pa., inserted a stick into one of his underground tanks to check the fuel level. When he took the stick out, it felt hot. Being curious, the man tied a thermometer onto a string and lowered it into the tank. He was quite surprised to read that the temperature inside the tank was 172° F. What could do this?

It turned out to be an underground coal fire. Centralia’s population at the time was 1,000, however, only a mere handful of citizens now live within its borders. A majority of the houses have been torn down and most of the borough’s roads and sidewalks are overgrown with brush. It is essentially a ghost town. If you could stand on an abandoned portion of Pa.’s Route 61, (it is now permanently barricaded off) you would see smoke and steam rising from cracks in the ground. The fire, which lies under 400 acres of land, is still burning and has enough coal to keep it going for 250 years.

According to The Encyclopedia of Earth, in China alone there is an estimated 20 to 30 million tons of coal burning in coal fires annually. Beside the economic loss, coal fires produce large amounts of toxic gases. For example, coal fires in China produce about 2 to 3 percent of the world’s annual output of CO₂ caused by fossil fuels.

Dr. Anupma Prakash at the Univ. of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute, suggests that the amount of CO₂ produced due to fires in coal mines is difficult to assess in part due to the reluctance of authorities in some countries to even acknowledge the magnitude of the problem or that the fires even exist. Prakash says, "Ironically, till recently, such a major environmental hazard was overlooked or largely undermined by the international community."

Off the top of my head I can’t tell you how many R&D dollars the U.S. has spent on quenching coal fires, or how much pressure Al Gore’s "green team" has put on international communities that have coal fires. It seems to me that maybe this would be a better place to start in fighting the effects of green-house gases on our atmosphere than say, making the entire population of America switch over to those curly-Q light bulbs (which save quite a bit of energy, by the way, as they barely generate enough light to see your hand in front of your face. And, they cost about as much as 13 good-old-fashioned light bulbs). Maybe the Al Gores of the world can afford them, but I’d have to take out a second mortgage to pay for a houseful of them. And because they don’t last very long you need a surplus. Did I mention they have mercury in them?

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