The Horns of A Dilemma: July 07

Through the Eyes of a Foreigner

By Andrew Engel

The Horns of a Dilemma

A modern day skirmish, with roots in century old decisions, is taking place to the south of Davao. 

It is a clash to win the hearts and minds of people, between the forces propelling modernisation and those who see its perils, or those who feel its footprint.

The decision by of the City Council to approve a coal fired power plant in Toril is the battleline for this confrontation.

Caught in the middle are the residents of Binugao and Hinatulan.

At its core, it is a confrontation born in mutually exclusive positions, in views which are contrary and in the complexity of human need and human behaviour. 

And here is one fact.  There are no simple answers.  No argument can win the day outright.

Why do we build coal plants if they cause so much harm to the environment and human health?  Why not use “clean” energy sources like solar, wind, tide, geothermal and the like?

It seems like a no-brainer.

Well, in answer to the first question, we didn’t know any better when it all kicked off.

We needed abundant energy to power the industrialization of our civilization.  We had burnt coal for a 1000 years, but late in the18^th century we turbo-charged it’s production to run our revolution.  We didn’t understand the harm we were causing the planet or our health by releasing carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxide and sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere and by spewing toxic waste and heavy metals into our pristine environment.

Or we didn’t want to know. 

(And if you want a health description for the gases above, let’s replace carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxide and sulphur dioxide with the words, global warming, lung cancer and acid rain.)

In was a period heralded as the dawn of a new age of prosperity for the human race.  And with it came an unprecedented advance in human knowledge enriching humankind.  The human race was on a roll, prospects looked good.

There was sting in the tail we only realised in hindsight. By the time we worked out that fossil fuels had some nasty side effects, and some of the knowledge is quite recent, the horse had bolted.  Too late to shut the gate or to go back and try another way.

And that partly answers the second question. Whole economies now depend on fossil fuels, our modern world is powered by its energy and millions of jobs have been created to run these industries, light our cities and fuel our cars.  

That is not, however, the whole story. 

Economics play a role, and profits. It is a fact that renewables being new technologies cost more to develop and this creates a price gap between the renewables and fossil fuels. You need technology that works, and to get it you need research, investment and time.   

In simple terms if you want renewables, you have to pay more. The investment of the private sector is higher and these costs would be passed on to consumers.

So, the coal is available and mining continues partly because the renewables are either not yet available or are still too expensive to compete.

 (I should mention that even without climate change we need to find alternative forms of energy as fossil fuels are non-renewable and are running out.  We are extracting these resources faster than they can be regenerated.)

This all adds up to a consensus view that we need to make a transition over time from the old non-renewable fossil fuels paradigm, to a new era, or risk throwing the world economy into turmoil, with millions of jobs lost and the calamitous consequences this would entail.

Let me return to the coal question.   The defenders of the fossil fuel era are trying to find a way to compete with the emerging renewables option.  For the coal industry that comes recently in the form of Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS).

That is the reengineering of our original decision to dig up the carbon.  The planet has been storing carbon dioxide for millions of years and the idea for coal combustion now is to put it back into the earth where it came from, to store it. 

The problem is that it took millions of years for the planet, beginning with decomposing plants and animals, to capture the carbon dioxide. We are now trying to find a way, unsuccessfully so far, to put it back but in a fraction of the time the planet took to form coal.

That is not, however, what is being proposed for the Binugao plant for the obvious reason that the technology is not available.

When its owners talk of clean coal, they use a term that was commonly used to describe any technology that reduced the emissions of sulphur dioxide or others oxides, or the concentrations of ash, sulphur and heavy metal by-products of coal combustion.  The term is now generally accepted to refer to CCS.

So the coal industry promotes advances in production technologies that dilute pollutants or recycle some elements. It is not the elimination of the pollutants and no reasonable argument can be made to say coal is “clean”.

If you wonder what burnt coal residue contains, here are a few of the nasties: mercury, arsenic, chromium, cobalt, lead, magnesium and zinc.  We have to put the residue somewhere and storage in landfills or ponds is the answer.  The concern is whether the nasties stay there.

You don’t have to be a rocket scientist or be educated in thermodynamics to understand that opening the jail door to this “slug” is best avoided.  It’s simple common sense. Nonetheless, we build coal plants around the world. China builds a new coal fired power plant every two weeks.  Almost 90% of the world’s energy needs come from fossil fuels.  That’s 90%!

So here we are, faced with the need, perhaps the uncontrollable desire, to improve the quality of life humans seek and the knowledge of the price we are paying for our “toys”.  The emerging question is not what amount are we willing to pay for our development?  We already know the answer that question.

The question is how much longer will we be willing to pay a price that could be higher than anything we can possibly imagine?

Well stick around,” you ain’t seen nothing yet”!

This is the predicament of two mutually exclusive positions. What someone once described as being caught between a rock and a hard place.

One thing is true. We are caught on the horns of a dilemma of our own making.

(you can contact Andrew or comment at engelmint@hotmail.com)