The Hidden Costs of Fossil Fuel Use

Charleston, WV

Hundreds of thousands of West Virginians are now without water due to a chemical spill. Freedom Industries (ever notice how frequently companies involved with these disasters use patriotic names?) says they're "confident" that only 5,000 gallons of MCHM (4-methylcyclohexane methanol) spilled from a 35,000-gallon tank. The spill has made the tap water in nine counties smell like licorice.

The president of the company, Gary Southern, doesn't know how the leak occurred, but he assures us that the chemical has "very low toxicity." MCHM is used in processing coal. It's a form of alcohol, and an article at CNN says that it causes rashes, headaches, dizziness, vomiting, nausea, etc., etc. There's basically no research about what it does to people. Animal tests indicate that it causes heart, liver and kidney damage.  The bigger questions are what the long-term effects will be at low levels, and how long low-level concentrations will remain in the affected water systems.

The governor of West Virginia has advised everyone in the affected area to avoid drinking and bathing; the water should only be used for flushing. Thousands of businesses are shut down, including all restaurants and even carwashes. Bottled water is being shipped in, and there are accusations of local merchants gouging residents. In the end this man-made disaster will cost millions of dollars in lost productivity and cleanup, and an unknown number of health problems that may stay with the victims for years.

As far as coal-related spills go, this was relatively minor. But problems like this happen all the time, across the country, and even though they get wall-to-wall coverage in the media when they occur, we forget about them before the next big one, leaving us with no incentive to deal with the underlying problems. For example:

Harriman, TN

In 2008, the Kingston Fossil Plant spill in Tennessee released a billion gallons of coal fly ash slurry from a pond along the Clinch River where the solid waste from the coal-fired power plant was stored. Local neighborhoods were covered by as much as 6 feet of sludge. A similar coal spurry spill occurred in 2000 when one of Massey Energy's (that of the Upper Big Branch Mine disaster) slurry impoundments collapsed, flooding local neighborhoods and creeks with 300 million gallons of poisonous black gunk. All life in the Wolf Creek and Coldwater Fork was killed. Slurry spills happen so frequently that it's impossible to enumerate them all. There's simply not enough space to put all the ash that burning millions of tons of coal produces.

San Bruno, CA

Energy production is a dirty, dangerous business. Coal mines and oil rigs are extremely dangerous places to work; the fatality rate on oil rigs is seven times higher than for all US workers. The BP oil spill in the Gulf was one of the biggest spills in years, costing tens of billions of dollars. In San Bruno, CA, a natural gas pipeline blew up in a neighborhood, killing eight and injuring 58.

Oklahoma was rocked by more than 3,000 earthquakes in 2013,  due to injection of fracking waste deep underground. Before fracking they had 50 a year.

Casselton, ND

In the past six months alone there have been three train derailments in which huge conflagrations occurred. The first was in Quebec, when a train carrying oil from the Bakken oil fields in North Dakota exploded in the town of Lac-Megantic, killing 47 people. The second was in Alabama two months ago, when a train carrying North Dakota crude derailed and burned for four days. The third was less than two weeks ago in the town of Casselton, North Dakota, when a train carrying Bakken crude exploded after running into another derailed train. Thousands of local residents were evacuated, though no one was hurt. Trains derail all the time, but they rarely burst into flame. There's clearly something different and dangerous about the oil coming from the Bakken Oil Patch.

Kalamazoo River

Oil pipelines are little better: in September a pipeline in North Dakota leaked 20,000 barrels of oil onto a farm, and the pipeline company didn't realize the pipeline was leaking till the farmer called them, and neglected to inform the public for 11 days. The same Canadian company that wants to build the Keystone XL pipeline, Enbridge, has a pipeline that ruptured in Michigan in 2010, releasing almost a million gallons of oil into the Kalamazoo River. One of Exxon Mobil's pipelines burst in Arkansas last March, forcing the evacuation of 22 homes. The Keystone XL pipeline is supposed to carry that same kind of crude oil. Would you want that pipeline coming through your neighborhood?

The railway responsible for Quebec disaster declared bankruptcy in two countries to shield their assets and avoid paying for the deaths and damage they caused. The companies in these industries simply don't have the resources to pay for the huge potential damage that their activities can cause. They're often subsidiaries of bigger companies, intentionally walled off from the parent so that they can quickly declare bankruptcy and avoid paying for the damage they cause.

Local residents, cities, counties and states wind up with gigantic cleanup bills, often asking the federal government to declare them disaster areas.

Fossil fuels are messy and dangerous to extract, messy and dangerous to transport, messy and dangerous to use (consider how many homes blow up every year in natural gas explosions). Their waste products are messy and dangerous to dispose of, and cause air pollution, mercury pollution, acid rain, etc. Not to mention the CO2 that's causing climate change.

At every juncture the expenses involved with cleaning up these messes are frequently not borne by the people profiting from fossil fuel extraction. It's probably the best example of an industry that has privatized profit while socializing the risk.

It is clear that exploitation of fossil fuels has a huge range of deleterious effects on the lives of Americans. Shouldn't they be paying for all the problems they're causing?

All these ancillary costs should be rolled into the taxes that the fossil fuel energy industry pays. That would make the electricity and transportation that rely on those sources cost more, but it would make the people who benefit from its use bear the actual costs. Eliminating the hidden subsidies of these industries would create more incentives for developing alternate energy sources that don't create such hazardous messes.