Economy, Ecology, and Sustainable Development

The other day I met a coal analyst for the financial industry. Upon discovering his profession I joked that I spend my life trying to put him out of work.

He promptly informed me of three things. First that, mountaintop coal removal has maybe another ten years left in it, before the market goes bust. He didn't explain why, but I'm guessing they're running out of mountain tops that are located in parts of the country with an economically disenfranchised populace (i.e. poor people). Secondly, that coal companies do a great job of rehabilitating mountains and putting nature "back the way it was." And thirdly, that he doesn't believe in climate change.

Apart from explaining how he could do the work he did on a daily basis and still sleep at night, the conversation was illuminating in other ways. Not because of bullets 1 and 3, but because of bullet 2: he sincerely believed that nature could be put back the way it was, like simply cleaning a messy room. Yet as we've learned from extinct species and continue to learn from our dying coral reefs, our dwindling glaciers ecosystems don't work that way. They may recover, but they can't be put back. What once was, to borrow a phrase from Tolkien, is now lost.

Now, this was not a stupid man. By the standards of our society he was well educated, and he earned his livelihood engaging in the kinds of financial analysis that the vast majority of us probably couldn't wrap our heads around. And yet, he had no idea of the coal industry beyond the numbers on that spreadsheet.

What it illustrates more than anything that there's a vast disconnect between what "nature" can take. We have not moved beyond the idea of a limitless frontier where the natural world could take all the assault which we threw at it and then some.

Mountain top coal removal is bad because at every stage: extraction, use, storage, it creates environmental degradation of the type that will last decades if not generations. Even if climate change were an act of scientific fiction (which I wholeheartedly do not believe it is), it doesn't change the fact that coal is nasty, nasty, stuff which is best left in the ground.

That this man, who spends 8 hours a day studying the coal industry and somehow never encountered this reality is to me the epitome of the disconnect between our economic system and the environmental system upon which that economic system depends. Until we rectify that, we're going to continue to have people pushing for fallacies such as "clean coal" and having so-called "industry experts" who really don't know that much at all.