opinion

Brisco, McManus: Community victory demonstrates why coal isn’t coming back

Before it stopped burning coal in 2015, Milwaukee’s Valley Power Plant was responsible for 26 deaths, 42 heart attacks and 450 asthma attacks each year, according to the Clean Air Task Force. Residents of the nearby neighborhood were predominantly low-income people of color who bore the burdens of burning coal for far too long.

During the presidential campaign, and since taking office, President Donald Trump and people in his administration have spoken glowingly about putting coal miners back to work. But despite these statements — and a lot of pressure on politicians from coal lobbyists — the irreversible reduction in burning coal for electricity is well underway.

A new report from The Wilderness Society, “False Promises: Why Coal Isn’t Coming Back,” highlights the Cleaner Milwaukee Coalition’s success in getting the Valley Power Plant off coal and onto cleaner burning natural gas. Our community’s victory, one of many across the country, illustrates how coal is in decline — and why misguided government energy subsidies and regulatory rollbacks will only hurt regular Americans.

“False Promises” shows that the decline of coal continues. Last year, 59 coal generators at 31 different power plants were shut down across the United States. That’s like taking 9 million cars off the road. Companies that mine publicly owned coal shipped 526 million tons for electricity generation in 2011; that number was down to 360 million tons in 2016. And these trends are sure to continue as other communities like ours pull together to win improvements for their health and quality of life by shutting down more coal plants.

With fewer coal-fired power plants polluting our air and water, there’s less demand to dig coal. That helps Americans in more ways than just cleaning up our air. The coal burned at the Valley Power Plant was shipped over a thousand miles from mines on public lands in Colorado and Montana. Outdated federal policies have long subsidized this practice. In Colorado, for example, coal companies pay less than the price of a Big Mac cheeseburger for the rights to mine a ton of publicly owned coal.

In other words, one way or another, we pay for coal over and over. We pay with our tax dollars when it’s pulled out of the ground at below-market rates, and we pay with our health when it’s burned in our communities, poisoning our children and ruining our air.

Still, we know the tide is changing. Coal has lost out in many communities to cleaner and cheaper forms of power: natural gas, wind and solar. Valley Power Plant switched to natural gas in 2015, and Wisconsin has a growing wind energy industry.

We were able to move past coal in Milwaukee by organizing together — uniting religious, health and environmental groups such as Clean Wisconsin — and educating our neighbors. But our federal government must also act.

As elected officials in Washington, D.C. talk about “energy dominance,” it is important to remember who pays the price for blindly putting energy development above everything else. And while we successfully worked together to get the Valley Power Plant converted to natural gas, hundreds of coal-fired power plants still pump out pollutants, disproportionately harming poor people and people of color across the country.

And until the last coal-fired power plant is offline, we’ll keep fighting for environmental justice for all people.

The Rev. Willie Brisco is the president of MICAH-the Milwaukee Inner City Congregations Allied for Hope. Patricia McManus is president and CEO of the Black Health Coalition of Wisconsin. Both were members of the Cleaner Milwaukee Coalition that worked to successfully transition the Valley Power Plant from coal to natural gas.