Minor Epiphany – Coal is Bad and I Reduce the Need for It
Sometimes you need a little perspective.
My job is difficult, full of challenges and small details that can be overwhelming when trying to get a job done correctly. The past year has been a constant struggle of change and failure and reinvention.
Today I got a reminder of why I do what I do.
At the risk of being political, I was thinking about how what I do, at least in part, reduces the need for coal in the big picture. Here’s the story of my minor epiphany.
My wife plays roller derby for PURR, Pennsylvania Underground Roller Rebellion*, and we drove down to a bout in St. Clairsville along the Ohio River, which is full of coal power plants. The drive down Ohio Route 7 is this odd mixture of natural beauty, dilapidated housing stock, and massive industrial plants. I used to do this drive when I was an outside salesman for a fiberglass manufacturer as well, and always found the coal plants, one of which you actually drive under, to be both fascinating and horrifying at the same time. Here are a few pics from my drive.
This plant is so big you actually drive under it. There are coal conveyors running everywhere, including one over a mountain and one to what looked like a coal ship unloader. (It’s tough to analyze too much at 70 MPH.)
Just a little farther down the road is this one. The large cooling tower in the background is in the next picture. Huge mechanical works like this strike me as both awe-inspiring and a bit malevolent.
Pretty wild, huh?
Full Disclosure: To be perfectly frank, I’m not a wild environmentalist. I was actually voted most conservative in my class in high school. I married a liberal, though, so I’m rather more moderate than I used to be.
My environmentalism stems heavily from the idea of stewardship. I firmly believe we don’t own the earth, we’re just care taking it for the next generation. I really want to be sure to leave my daughter Felicity a good place to live, not one that we’re guilty of using up. So that’s my bias, for what it’s worth.
Anyway, back to coal.
I’ve seen various figures, but a quick Google search turned up that 44% of our power is generated with coal. I can’t say I like this. It’s far from a clean burning fuel and it’s also a pretty tough thing to get out of the earth. Miners don’t have easy (or in my eyes, good) jobs. I know the media latches onto trapped miner stories like a rabid dog, but it is partly because it really is awful. How many other people can asphyxiate at work?
I also had a really shocking experience involving coal in my old job. There is a little town called Cheshire, Ohio. American Electric Power (AEP) has a coal plant there. There is a weatherization agency there that handles low income insulation. They were a prospective client. In speaking with the manager, she said that AEP had actually bought the entire town (for $20 million, according to the Sierra Club) because of health effects from living literally in the shadow of the plant. The manager told me she knew people who had gotten cancer, mercury poisoning, and a number of other awful maladies.
It’s a very surreal town. All of the houses that were bought were razed to the ground. So there is a small town with a few streets and only very few houses. The rest is grass. Look it up on Google Maps, or here’s a blog post with pictures of grass where houses used to be. It’s a bit of Erin Brockovich only a few hours from my house.
At the time, I really wasn’t paying all that much attention, the problem was big and it didn’t feel like there was anything I could do personally.
Today, I realized that wasn’t the case. Admittedly, I affect natural gas usage much, much more than electricity usage, but I do make recommendations that save power through lighting, appliances, and of course my work reduces air conditioning bills. In time I will add solar panel installation to my business, and that really makes a difference. After about a month of Mondays**, I really needed some perspective.
Funny what a drive through Appalachia can do.
It’s good to have some big picture motivation to keep fighting after a year that has nearly broken me.
It seems almost inappropriate to put a call to action here, but fixing your home is one of the largest concrete steps you can take to reduce our dependence on coal. Home Performance has a tremendous number of benefits, from increased comfort to helping pay for itself to healthier indoor air. Being good to the coming generations is pretty much a bonus. My advanced process will show you several paths to really fix the things you don’t like about your house, and leave a little more for our kids. If this sounds intriguing to you, give me a call for one of my free 2-3 hour energy consultations.
* Rachel won MVP jammer, which is the point scoring position in roller derby.
** ‘Sounds like someone has a case of the Mondays‘ is a line from Office Space. The retort later to that line is borderline epic (there is swearing, though, which I generally avoid in this blog). If you haven’t seen the movie Office Space, please do. If you have ever worked in an office or any company of reasonable size, you may find yourself rolling on the floor laughing.
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