Guest post by Viv Forbes
There is a persistent green myth that coal-fired power generation causes city smogs. It does not.
City air pollution is nothing new. King Edward I complained about London pollution in 1306, as did Queen Elizabeth I in 1578, long before the first steam engine operated.
Let’s look at the causes of some famous smogs – London/Pittsburgh, Los Angeles/Santiago, the Dust Bowls and the Asian Smogs.
The London smogs were caused by open-air combustion of newspapers, wood and cheap high-sulphur unwashed coal in domestic fires, stoves and boilers; by coal-burning blacksmiths, brewers and ironworkers in smoky forges, furnaces and coke plants; and by many smoky steam locomotives; all with inefficient combustion and no pollution controls. The smog was slowly eliminated by clean air regulations and by changing to “clean coal by pipe” (town gas) and “clean coal by wire” (electricity).
The Los Angeles smogs were caused mainly by backyard incinerators, vehicle exhausts and natural air inversions. They were reduced by using cleaner fuels, better engines and compulsory pollution-control equipment. Santiago has undergone a similar clean-up.
The Dust Bowl conditions of the Great Plains in USA were caused by drought and wind erosion of newly cultivated soils. Gobi Desert storms produced the Yellow River and the Yellow Sea and contribute to the Asian Brown Cloud today.
Today’s Asian smogs have many sources – forest fires in Indonesia; open air cremations in India; dust from volcanic eruptions and desert storms; soot, ash and other pollutants from millions of domestic rubbish fires, mosquito fires, cooking fires and heaters using anything combustible – cow dung, wood, paper, cardboard, plastic or cheap unwashed coal; and soot and unburnt hydro-carbons from millions of vehicles, many with engines needing maintenance and no pollution controls. Beijing today combines the 1950’s problems of both London and Los Angeles.
The Asian smog is NOT caused by producing electricity in modern power stations with closed boilers, pollution controls and using high-quality washed coal such as exported by Australia to Asia. The “power station pollution” pictured so eagerly in ABC and Green propaganda is actually steam from the cooling towers.
The main products released by modern coal-fired power stations are water vapour and carbon dioxide – both are essential life supporters. Neither one is dangerous. Both make our climate more liveable, but the contribution of carbon dioxide to climate is tiny. And the carbon dioxide produced by burning coal has done more to encourage the growth of plants and the greening of planet Earth than Greenpeace will ever do.
“Clean coal by wire” into every home is the one thing that could solve much of the Asian air pollution.
Viv Forbes,
Rosewood Qld Australia
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John sayeth: “It is also accurate that if you have almost complete combustion as well as modern pollution controls — which all coal fired power plants have today in the US and Europe…”
Not quite all. George W. Bush tried to get the “Clean Skies” bill passed that would allow older powerplants to upgrade their pollution controls as much as possible/practical but the greens blocked it. Yup, the watermelons kept powerplants from cleaning up. They demanded that the only way anything would be allowed to be done was the plants had to be brought up to current standards. Just one problem, the only way to do that would be to knock it down and build a new plant, which of course the watermelons would file lawsuit upon lawsuit to block after the older plants were razed.
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John says:
April 30, 2013 at 4:18 pm
So I’d like to ask you, collegially: which pollutants (if any) do you think damaged high altitude trees in the Adirondacks, and what is your basis? I might have missed an article or report on another pollutant.
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Like I said, conifer dieback had already been noticed/documented in high mountain sites in both the northern & southern Appalachians as far back as the 40s. Dated, dead snags & regenerated living trees showed that the dieback occurred in waves — tree deaths moved slowly downwind as the windward, leading edge of living tree stands became exposed to the elements. The trailing edge of living trees likewise moved downwind as new seedlings became established in the leeward of the stands. Evidence from dated dead wood showed that this had been occurring for thousands of yrs. When much of these coniferous forests were cut wholesale in the 30s (thanks to Roosevelt), shelter from living stands was suddenly gone & local extirpation of the conifers occurred. The “heath balds” on Smokey Mnt tops are examples where this had already occurred naturally. Death of conifers on stressful high, east NA mountains is an old and ongoing issue.
If sulfur is getting to the Adirondacks, so is NOx, which photochemically produces ozone. Sulfur has nothing to do w/ozone.
To Galane: your point about the Greens wanting all plants to meet standards of a new plant build today is correct. And a lot of such plants are now being shut down because the costs for some plants of doing so is prohibitive. These standards mostly had to do with emissions of SO2 and oxides of nitrogen.
Virtually complete combusion ensures that virtually no black carbon (soot) or party burned hydrocarbons go up the stack ot a coal plant in the US, but complete combustion doesn’t prevent oxides of sulfur from going up, nor does it prevent oxides of nitrogen from being creates and going up the stack. You need technology to control the last two.
To Beng: I hadn’t realized that logging at high altitudes in the early to mid-1900s had made it harder for remaining trees to remain alive, thanks for that. And you are correct that oxides of nitrogen reach the Adirondacks. How much oxone is created depend upon the concentrations of oxides of nitrogen and of volatile organic compounds (from automobiles, and, yes, from trees and other vegetation), and the amount of heat and sunlight. So you will get oxone formation in the Adirondacks. It is just that there would be less oxone there than in locations where there are more of the precursor pollutants, such as downwind of major cities.
Make that ozone, not oxone. Failing eyesight….
I read sometime last year, that in Oz, they were combining solar farms with coal generators. I don’t know what has transpired since, but pics were shown of the massive amounts of solar panels near an existing station?
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