An Environmental History of Coal and Pollution in the United States

 

The history of coal is surprisingly complex. I was unaware of how prevalent coal is in global society, past and present, before writing this article. In my research, I have come across coal as a focal point in geopolitics, a class symbol, a representation of progress, and a sign of decline.[1] All these human interactions with coal have taken place on a grand stage, the environment. In recent decades, historians have started studying the environment’s role in our history, and how humans have shaped the environment.[2] This article draws from this research to give a historical perspective on how, and why, coal has contributed to the degradation of our global environment. I do this through the examination of the effects of fossil capitalism on coal consumption and mining, and the attempts to regulate pollution. I have chosen the United States as the focus for this article as America's relationship with coal continues to be politically important into the present.[3]

 

I have structured the article as follows: First, I will tell the story of coals origins in the United States. Then, I will explain how and why coal emissions impact the environment before examining two examples of how American society sought to bring urban pollution under control during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Finally, I will turn to coal mining in the twentieth century and assess its environmental impacts and their root causes.

 

The origins of coal in the United States

Until the turn of the nineteenth century, coal was not used for energy on a large scale in the U.S. This was because the nation's sprawling forests provided cheap and abundant firewood to its eastern seaboard cities. In larger cities, such as New York and Philadelphia, British coal imports supplemented their energy demands, which were beginning to exceed what forests could provide around 1810. Although America had vast coal reserves in the Appalachian Mountains, it was thought that this coal could only be transported over land, which made the journey dangerous and expensive. Coal from Britain was therefore deemed more accessible and affordable, despite being over 3000 miles away.[4]

 

This all changed with the War of 1812. With Britain and the U.S. at war, British coal exports ceased. Large East Coast cities were impacted heavily by energy shortages. In coal-dependent Philadelphia, Jacob Cist, an entrepreneur, sought to capitalise on this new energy demand. Cist and his team of hired labourers hiked into the Pennsylvania wilderness to harvest coal from exposed coal seams. After they gathered as much coal as they could, Cist devised a plan to make his venture profitable. Instead of transporting the coal back to Philadelphia by carriage over land, Cist risked his cargo on makeshift rafts and navigated them down the perilous and shallow Leigh River. The gamble was a success, as all but one raft arrived in Philadelphia. [5]

 

Cist had proved that coal could be transported to Pennsylvania over water. Subsequently, the Pennsylvanian government sought to build a canal on the Leigh River to improve access to Appalachian coal reserves. This was to gain energy independence from the British. Once completed in 1825, the Leigh Canal channelled massive quantities of cheap energy to Philadelphia and other East Coast cities. Appalachian coal severed restraints on the economic and population growth of cities imposed by energy dependence on firewood. The cost-saving effects of abundant cheap energy, meanwhile, allowed manufacturers to invest in factories and steam engines. Ultimately, access to cheap energy enabled the beginning of the American Industrial Revolution, which would take off in earnest in the 1840s. [6]

 

Coal Pollution

Industrialisation transformed nineteenth century America in numerous ways: it created a consumer society, increased urbanisation and gave rise to American economic power.[7] However, industrialisation also brought with it an unforeseen consequence - endemic pollution. 

 

When coal is burnt efficiently, it mainly emits carbon dioxide and small quantities of sulphur dioxide. Carbon dioxide is harmless to humans and plants. However, in large amounts, it is detrimental to the wider environment as it is a greenhouse gas. These gases trap heat in the atmosphere and contribute to climate change. Meanwhile, sulphur dioxide emissions do greater immediate damage to vegetation and aquatic life. This is due to soil and lake acidification caused by acid rain. What is important about the impact of emissions from efficient coal use is that it takes time for the negative effects to accumulate. For much of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, there was insufficient carbon in the atmosphere to impact the climate. Likewise, most soils were rich in acid-neutralising minerals that offset the impact of acid rain. [8]

The problem with pollution during this period was that coal was burnt inefficiently. Inefficient combustion produces the familiar black smoke of Victorian cities, which brings with it more abrupt environmental impacts. Black smoke contains impurities and carbon particles that irritate respiratory systems. As a result of smoke pollution, respiratory diseases, such as tuberculosis, pneumonia, and bronchitis became major public health issues in U.S. industrial cities, such as Cincinnati and Pittsburgh during this period. [9] Moreover, smoke-darkened skies restricted vitamin D absorption. This caused a rickets endemic in young children living in industrial cities during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. [10]

 

But why was coal burnt inefficiently? I argue that fossil capitalism is to blame. Before 1900, all coal ovens were hand stoked. The historian B. W. Clapp describes the ideal stoker, a worker who is well-paid and solely focused on trickle-feeding coal into the ovens. This would effectively eliminate black smoke and efficiently burn coal. However, the typical stoker was poorly paid and overburdened with numerous jobs.[11] For industrialists, it made fiscal sense to understaff their factories and underpay their workers because coal was cheaper than labour. The contemporary writer Reverend Charles Kingsley observed this in his book Water Babies stating, “it pays better not to consume the whole fuel and to let the soot escape.” [12]Overall, smoke was burnt inefficiently because it was profitable for industrialists to do so. This is an example of capitalism exerting fiscal pressure on industry to be wasteful, and therefore polluting.

 

Resistance and regulation

However, America's environmental consciousness began to awake in the 1890s as citizens sought to revitalise cities plagued by pollution. By this period, economic growth had developed a substantial middle class in the nation. Some of the women of these households developed an environmental philosophy that was grounded in morality, health and aesthetics. Cleanliness was understood to secure the health and morality of families. Moreover, the City Beautiful Movement - an organised effort to improve urban living during the late 1800s - linked this understanding to civilised life.[13] These reasons caused women to form social groups that aimed to influence pollution control. In particular, the Women’s Health Protective Association of Allegheny County sought to defend the health and morality of their families and civilisation by lobbying for smoke abatement. While this organisation succeeded in influencing some smoke abatement legislation, there was a lack of scientific evidence linking smoke to adverse health. This ultimately prevented smoke abatement from being prioritised by state governments who were concerned about public health issues with hard evidence, such as sewage. [14]

 

For much of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, water, not air, was America's primary focus for pollution. Sewage's impact on the water supply was the main environmental concern for public health. In fact, it was the Pennsylvania state governments efforts to solve sewage contamination in drinking water that revealed the extent of coal-related industries' water pollution. The chloritization of drinking water began in 1908 in Jersey City and was later adopted in industrial areas. The chlorine reacted with ammonia and phenolics deposited in the water by the burning of coke-distilled coal used for iron smelting. This created a pungent, medicinal-tasting water. At first, chlorine was blamed for the issue. However, after a difference in water taste was observed between high-coke and low-coke use areas in the mid-1920s, the U.S. Public Health Service (USPHS) linked the issue to coke-related phenol pollution. [15]

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Rather than remedy the phenol issue through the courts, the USPHS cooperated with the polluters, allowing for voluntary regulation to avoid driving industry out of state. In a 1924 settlement, the USPHS concluded that phenol quenching – evaporating wastewater- was preferable to disposing of it in rivers. However, this only shifted the burden of pollution onto the air rather than eliminating it altogether.[16] In this example, the government agency responsible for environmental regulation was hesitant to incur economic repercussions. As a result, inadequate regulation was enforced, and the polluting effects of coal were not removed from the environment. This is a recurring feature of environmental regulation and part of the reason why coal has been so destructive to our environment.

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The Environmental Consequences of Modern Mining

So far, we have seen how industrialisation and coal use brought pollution into the cities. In the mountains, America's coal dependence has created a similar set of problems and a lasting environmental impact. This is evident in the case of Mountaintop Removal in Appalachia. Mountaintop removal (MTR) is the most cost-effective, and environmentally ruinous, means of coal extraction. In short, MTR first involves the deforestation of an area above an identified coal seam. Then, explosives are used to loosen the rock and soil. After this, earth-moving machinery is utilised to remove waste rock into fill pits – these are typically the valleys in between mountains – and extract coal seams in their entirety. This practice was pioneered in 1877 on the Kansas prairie. In 1913, MTR accounted for 0.3% of American coal consumption. By 1940, it had increased to 9.4%, and then to 40% in 1970. [17]

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MTR is at surface level. its environmental impacts are therefore greater than traditional deep mining methods. loss of habitat caused by deforestation and mountain erosion displaces wildlife and decreases biodiversity. Other ecological impacts of MTR are less obvious. Revegetation of the mined area is difficult due to soil acidification. Valley fill run-off pollutes surface water with heavy metals and acids. This affects local drinking water supplies, harms aquatic life and decreases biodiversity. Moreover, aerosolised dust from surface mining and explosives causes respiratory issues in local towns. As a result of water and air pollution, communities in MTR areas have a significantly higher rate of birth defects compared to the national average.[18]

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Now that we understand what MTR is, we can ask why does it exist? The short answer is, unsurprisingly, economics. It is simply a cheaper method of harvesting coal as it requires less time and labour and has a greater coal extraction yield than deep mining. However, the mining industry's adoption of MTR was not out of sheer greed. In the 1960s, natural gas became a viable cheaper energy alternative to coal, particularly in the domestic sphere where it was used for central heating. This caused the price of coal to plummet. To remain competitive with other energy sources, coal extraction had to become more efficient.[19] Much like the intentionally inefficient coal use of nineteenth century industrialists, MTR is a product of fossil capitalisms’ incentive to damage the environment for economic gain.

 

Coal, Past and Present

Coal has transformed America's environment in many ways from the construction of the Leigh River canal in 1825, to the rapid mountain erosion of modern mining methods. These innovations have brought affordable power to American cities, allowing industry to grow and improve the quality of people’s lives. But it has come at a great cost. While inefficient coal combustion is a thing of the past, the slowly accumulating emissions of efficient burning are now causing climate change and habitat destruction. While I have focused on examples from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the reasons for inadequate environmental legislation and the effects of fossil capitalism are still relevant today.

In the twenty-first century, an era of climate change and vigilant environmental activism, it is reasonable to expect the U.S. government to intervene in this process of environmental destruction. However, government intervention has been made difficult due to the politicisation of environmental regulation. This political conflict is between the prioritisation of economic or environmental interests. Ultimately, this conflict threatens the U.S. government’s ability to create and apply legislation. For example, clean energy has become a partisan issue. President Obama's Clean Power Plan was put into effect in 2015 to decrease carbon emissions. After the opposing political party came to power, President Trump suspended the Clean Power Plan in 2018 and replaced it with the America First Energy plan. This plan focused on job creation in the coal industry, opening up more land for coal mining, and cheap fossil fuel production.[20] The political conflict between economics and the environment within the United States changing leadership is preventing environmental destruction from being regulated.

America's current political inability to effectively carry out environmental legislation is stifling real progress towards a greener future. Overall, coal has been and still is, so destructive to America’s environment because fossil capitalism depends on environmentally ruinous methods for economic gain. Moreover, frequent changes in U.S. political leadership have prevented the government from sustainably regulating the causes of pollution. Ultimately, this ensures coal's continued degradation of America's environment.

 

References

[1]  Barbra Freese, Coal: A Human History, Rev ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2016), 115; Ibid, 12; Geoffrey L. Buckley, Extracting Appalachia: Images of the Consolidation Coal Company 1910-1945 (Athens: Ohio University Press: 2004), 130; David Stradling and Peter Thorsheim, “The Smoke of Great Cities: British and America Efforts to Control Air Pollution, 1860-1914,” Environmental History 4, no. 1 (January 1999): 32

[2] Alfred D. Chandler, Jr, “Anthracite Coal and the Beginnings of the Industrial Revolution in the United States,” business History Review 46, no.2 (Summer 1972), 141-181; E. A. Wrigley, Energy and The English Industrial Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010)

[3] Sara Vakhshouri, “the America First Energy Plan: Renewing the Confidence of American Energy Producers,” Atlantic Council (Aug 2017): 1-9.

[4] Freese, Coal, 103-6.

[5] Ibid, 108-115.

[6] Christopher F. Jones, “A Landscape of Energy Abundance: Anthracite Coal Canals and the Roots of American Fossil Fuel Dependence, 1820 – 1860, Environmental History 15, no.3 (July 2010): 458 -62.

[7] Ibid, 457; Chandler, “Anthracite coal,” 180.

[8] B. W. Clapp, An Environmental History of Britian since the Industrial Revolution (London: Routledge, 1994), 55-57.

[9] David Stradling and Peter Thorsheim, “The Smoke of Great Cities: British and America Efforts to Control Air Pollution, 1860-1914,” Environmental History 4, no. 1 (January 1999): 8

[10] Freese, Coal, 83-84.

[11] Clapp, An Environmental History, 20.

[12] Elizabeth Fisher, Environmental Law: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 39.

[13] David E. Nye, “Review: Smoke gets in Your Eyes: Pollution, Aesthetics and Social Class,” Reviews in American History, Vol 28, no.3 (September 200): 423.

[14] Freese, Coal, 150-53.

[15] Joel A. Tarr, “Searching for a ‘Sink’ for Industrial Waste: Iron-Making Fuels and the Environment,” Environmental History Review 18, no.1 (spring 1994): 20-21.

[16] Ibid, 22.

[17] Brad R. Woods and Jason S. Gordon, “Mountaintop Removal and Job Creation: Exploring to the relationship using Spatial regression,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 101, no.4 (July 2011): 808; Chad Montrie, “Expedient Environmentalism: Opposition to Coal Surface Mining in Appalachia and the united Mine Workers of America, 1945-1975,” Environmental History 5, no.1 (Jan, 2000): 80- 82.

[18] David Rosner, “Blowing the Lid off Mountaintops,” The Milbank Quarterly 92, no.4 (December 2014): 648- 651.

[19] Montrie, “Expedient Environmentalism,” 81.

[20] Sara Vakhshouri, “The America First Energy Plan: Renewing the Confidence of America Energy Producers,” Atlantic Council (August 2017): 1.