Last Thursday in Hope, Arkansas there were two meetings. One was widely attended, the other was not… mostly because hardly anyone had heard of it.
They hadn’t heard of it because it snuck in under the wire, with barely (if at all) the proper notices and alerts. It was a quorum court meeting, and on the agenda was a motion to approve a bond issuance “not to exceed” $185,000,000. Aside from one dissenting voice of sanity, the motion was passed.
It was passed without allowing anyone to comment, and upon only one reading.
Hempstead County and Arkansas Electric Cooperative Corporation are now investors in the Turk Coal Plant, meaning residents and taxpayers are now on the hook for nearly 200 million dollars.
Why do they need this public backing?Coal’s dirty little secret is that it is on the way out, and everybody knows this.Power plants are constructed with a budget to pay off the cost of the plant over 20 or 30 years.Coal will soon become so economically unviable that these plants will be forced to close, leaving taxpayers and bondholders to pick up the check. How incredibly irresponsible.
Meanwhile, across town at the University of Arkansas Community College at Hope, I and a few hundred other people were cramming ourselves into the library to listen and submit comments to the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality (ADEQ). They were holding a public hearing regarding mercury and other HAPs that the Turk plant will be emitting.
Employees from the plant were there, wearing florescent yellow t-shirts that said “Support Turk” on them. I wonder how many of those “employees” were contractors: temporary workers who don’t even live in Hempstead County, or possibly even Arkansas. Adding evidence to my suspicions was a documentary film maker present at the hearing who had filmed most of them leaving the plant earlier that day.
There was one local employee of SWEPCO who did give comments, and spoke at length about how much they all needed the plant because he had six kids and he needed his job with SWEPCO to take care of them.
He got the loudest applause of anyone the entire evening.
I still fail to see how one person’s irresponsible choices regarding his over-eager reproductive urges is a logical or even sane reason to defend building a coal plant.
A coal plant that will kill people - perhaps even a kid or two, since they are the ones most susceptible to the pollution.
A coal plant which is proposed and supported by the same industry and companies who are responsible for irresponsibly building this country’s energy infrastructure on coal power, which has killed countless thousands and put our entire world-ecosystem in jeopardy from global climate change.
This same, poor, hard-working employee so concerned with supporting his kids has no concern for the destruction coal is wrecking on the futures of those same children. And not just the future of their health, but their economy too. Carbon legislation is going to happen during the next president’s term, and it will make coal so expensive that many coal plants will have to be shut down. Why, then, are we building new coal plants?
The coal companies do a great job of moving into impoverished regions, convincing the local unemployed and depressed peoples that a plant would be good for them, that coal is clean, and fill their heads with propaganda about how environmentalists are just nuts who want to take their jobs away from them.
The truth is environmentalists have always been human rights activists as well. This has always been the case for as long as both movements have existed. The two issues go hand in hand. But now environmentalists are also economists—we know that a green environment and a new energy infrastructure are the replacements for the manufacturing jobs that we have lost overseas.Green jobs would provide more employment and more opportunities than any coal plant ever has. It would revitalize our energy system, reduce energy bills, and strengthen our economy, doing much to alleviate the economic problems faced by so many Americans.
So, let’s sum up: taxpayers on the hook for $185 million for coal, a man with 6 kids wants the coal plant, not understanding it will kill them and that green energy jobs will provide not only jobs for him, but their future as well.And people wonder why we’re against new coal plants?
All coal has to give us is more of the same, dirty, and impoverished status quo we’ve been suffering under for so long. We all need to say no to coal and yes to clean energy, and we need to shout it everywhere Big Coal tries to put up another lousy plant.We can keep doing the same things we have done and expect different results (the definition of insanity) or we can do something new and build a new energy future.
