King Coal: Hoist on His Own Petard

Now I must point out that I already was aware of most of this legislation and the back story to it; but what I was unaware of was the 1977 law which would and should have gone into place. You see the congress in 1977 was poised to pass massive new regulations which would have dealt with coal power houses.

But at the behest of the Southern Company, who pretty much lied to the 1977 congress, congress decided not to implement such laws. We would have been far better off if they had passed them back then.

Instead all currently operating power houses were just grandfathered in. What this meant was that they got to keep on polluting. In addition to the carbon dioxide they gave off in the thousands of pounds, they also were allowed to keep spewing forth mercury, arsenic and many other compounds.

The congress of 1977 took the utility industry at its word. A word that I can now say they did not live up to at all! I have worked in quite a few power houses, and I have not worked on one project aimed at carbon dioxide they give off.

Furthermore I know of no effort to curb mercury or arsenic that they spew out. The only thing I have worked on in recent years was a SCR, or Selective Catalytic Reduction. Basically a SCR is just analogous to your catalytic converter in you car or truck. Its purpose is to get the NOx (nitric oxides) out of stack emissions. Selective catalytic reduction of NOx using ammonia as the reducing agent was patented in the United States by the Englehard Corporation in 1957. As I say I have never worked on a system designed to curb mercury or arsenic emissions from power houses. So in the meantime the operators of said power houses have contributed liberally to killing off us as a species and contributed liberally to the campaigns of the likes of Mitch McConnel and John Boehner etal!