Counter-Intuitive

The AP story featured on the ONW website on the nasty WE Energies blunder that caused significant water and air pollution included the following opening paragraph:

"Decades-old coal ash hurled from a Wisconsin power plant into Lake Michigan during a landslide this week probably doesn't pose a significant environmental risk, although the extent of the damage is not immediately clear, experts said Wednesday."

If you left it up to this reporting, and coal-industry sponsored outfits, you'd believe that coal ash was good for you, and probably beneficial to add into your kool-aid. 

So what do others say about coal ash?  Here is one report from a physician's group titled "Coal Ash - the Toxic Threat to Our Health and Environment":

- While the toxic contents of coal ash may vary depending on where the coal is mined, coal ash commonly contains some of the world’s deadliest toxic metals: arsenic, lead, mercury, cadmium, chromium and selenium

- These and other toxicants in coal ash can cause cancer and neurological damage in humans. They can also harm and kill wildlife, especially fish and other water-dwelling species

- Coal ash is the second-largest industrial waste stream in the U.S., after mining wastes

Even if it is somewhere in the middle of the profit-focused coal supporters who want to sell this as an inconsequential slip and the selfish physicians who are looking to improve health, it is still absolutely obnoxious to enable and publish a story about pouring a bunch of nasty shit into our water ways and air and to then say that it probably doesn't harm anything, but we don't really know.

Posted in: sustainability,Water