Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #626400 in Books
• Published on: 2006-06-08
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 352 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. After a generation out of the spotlight, coal has reasserted its centrality: the United States "burn[s] more than a billion tons" per year, and since 9/11 and the Iraq war, independence from foreign oil has become positively patriotic. Rolling Stone contributing editor Goodell's last book, the bestselling Our Story, was about a mine accident, which clearly made a deep impression on him. Our reliance on coal—the unspoken foundation of our "information" economy—has, Goodell says, led to an "empire of denial" that blocks us from the investments necessary to find alternative energy sources that could eventually save us from fossil fuel. Goodell's description of the mining-related deaths, the widespread health consequences of burning coal and the impact on our planet's increasingly fragile ecosystem make for compelling reading, but such commonplace facts are not what lift this book out of the ordinary. That distinction belongs to Goodell's fieldwork, which takes him to Atlanta, West Virginia, Wyoming, China and beyond—though he also has a fine grasp of the less tangible niceties of the industry. Goodell understands how mines, corporate boardrooms, commodity markets and legislative chambers interrelate to induce a national inertia. Goodell has a talent for pithy argument—and the book fairly crackles with informed conviction. (June 8)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
In January, the nation watched, transfixed, as 13 coal miners were trapped underground at West Virginia's Sago mine, only to learn that all but one had perished. That same month, four other men lost their lives in Appalachian mines. Five more miners were killed in May in an underground blast in southeastern Kentucky, bringing this year's fatalities to more than 30 and adding to a mining-related death toll that has risen to more than 100,000 since the start of the 20th century.

Even that grim total, however, pales in comparison to the number of Americans who die prematurely each year from the fine-particle pollution emanating from the coal-fired power plants these miners supply with fuel: 24,000 each year, according to the American Lung Association. That toll -- coupled with the impact that the burning of fossil fuels is having on the Earth's climate -- must be weighed against the cheap electricity that coal has given us for nearly 150 years.

Jeff Goodell's new Big Coal explores this tension in depth, comparing Americans' energy habits to the behavior of a Bowery junkie: "We keep telling ourselves it's time to come clean, without ever actually doing it." The book's strength lies in Goodell's ability to connect our mundane daily activities, such as flipping on the living room lights and powering up our laptops, with the grimy business that powers these things. "Most of us have no idea how central coal is to our everyday lives or what our relationship with this black rock really costs us," Goodell writes. "We may not like to admit it, but our shiny white iPod economy is propped up by dirty black rocks." The developing world's relationship with coal is even grimier, he reports; like such environmentalist authors as Lester Brown, Goodell examines how the voracious appetite for coal of China's booming industries will affect the planet we share in the coming decades.

It's hard to write a lively book about the coal industry, but Goodell, a Rolling Stone contributing editor and the author of Our Story, a book about a 2002 mine accident, has managed to pull it off. His evocative prose carries the narrative from rural West Virginia to the Georgia state legislature and a small Chinese village, with plenty of stops in between. (One of his best lines: "The Georgia legislative session is forty days of big hats, big bellies, and big cigars.")

The author runs into trouble only when his breezy, arch tone seems a touch jarring, as it does when he observes, "If the sorry history of the coal mining industry has proven one thing, it's that when it comes to enacting and enforcing safety laws against Big Coal, the only good lobbyists are dead miners."

The story also bogs down in the middle of the book when Goodell details the excruciatingly slow federal regulatory process for power plants, which is simply impossible to relate in a scintillating way.

In general, Goodell is sensitive to his subjects, whether they're the miners who pry coal from the earth or the hapless residents living near a power plant and breathing in the rock's fumes. (He shows less sympathy for coal industry officials, who appear only intermittently throughout the book and usually in an unflattering light.)

One of the most heartbreaking passages focuses on Charlotte O'Rourke, who moved to Masontown, Pa., with her husband, Donald, in the 1970s and stayed even though it now houses "one of the dirtiest coal plants in America," Hatfield's Ferry, run by Allegheny Energy. At 56, Donald O'Rourke came down with a rare form of kidney cancer and died less than a year later; his widow decided to stay but never looked at her surroundings the same way. "You really don't have to be a scientist to see what's going on around here," she told Goodell a few months before she was diagnosed with precancerous cells in her esophagus. "We live under the plume, and people are sick and people are dying. I mean, how complicated is it, really?"

Goodell doesn't offer much in the way of solutions, though he briefly explores the virtues of e-hybrid cars, which use larger batteries and an electrical outlet to save on gas and emit less carbon dioxide, and a new technology that "goes by the unfortunately complicated name of integrated gasification combined cycle," a coal-burning process that produces less waste than traditional methods and allows plant operators to capture carbon dioxide before it escapes into the atmosphere. Still, Big Coal gives its readers a clear sense of the tradeoffs we face in our feverish quest for inexpensive energy, and that's more than enough for one book.

Reviewed by Juliet Eilperin
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

From Booklist
Viewing the political and economic heft of the American coal industry, journalist Goodell presents an admiring view of the workers who mine, transport, and burn coal and an adversarial posture toward the CEOs, lobbyists, and politicians who monitor industry interests. In the background of the author's narratives, which are pegged to his visits to coalfields, coal-hauling trains, and power plants, lurks environmental pollution. Goodell injects relevant statistics (e.g., on average, an American uses 20 pounds of coal in a lifetime) that effectively personalize the reader's connection to an industry most ignore until a power outage. He astutely recognizes and heavily criticizes how mining companies and utilities capitalize on this disconnection in their public relations. Disputing their assertions that standards of living will suffer from the host of regulations and treaties he favors, Goodell particularizes his objections in detail useful to those who closely follow environmental issues. The circulation numbers of a comparable critique of the fossil fuels complex, Boiling Point, by Ross Gelbspan (2004), may predict Goodell's appeal to library patrons. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

Excellent bit of journalism
Goodell's thoughtful work serves as an important reminder to Americans of the dangers that come with cheap electricity. Yet the author takes his analysis one step further, demonstrating how coal's cheap price masks its many hidden costs, lung disease, environmental destruction, and global warming. Coal exists in a highly flawed marketplace, where none of these costs are included in the price paid by the consumer, a market failure that the coal industry gladly supports in order to avoid any reasonable regulator regime. Moreover, coal serves as a great case study of how the market place does not respond unless pushed to tertiary effects as the coal industry continues to build new plants that lack the gasification technology that eliminates most of the pollutants at a cost increase of 20-25%.

The author does fudge a bit when describing the economic bonanza that might come from government imposed demands for clean technology. That is not to say that I believe he is wrong, green industry is indeed booming and China and India will soon need to adopt it or suffer grave social dislocation and health costs resulting from pollution. However, Goodell could have done a better job offering data on this area.

In any event, energy remains perhaps the key issue of the 21st century. This author's aditton to the debate provides welcomed and easily digestible insights.

Brilliant Expose
Goodell is an excellent writer, and the reporting contained in Big Coal could not be more timely. He has written the right book at the right time. The world of the coal industry is a bit like coal itself: it is buried--but not in the ground. Rather, it is covered by a thick layer of propaganda and public ignorance. Goodell unearths the unpleasant truths about coal mining, coal power, and the shady political game that both of these industries play. This is not so much a polemic, but simply a great piece of journalism. There are scores of fascinating personalities and memorable scenes. The book also achieves a remarkable overall synthesis. I could hardly put it down, and I think that if anyone was going to reveal the coal industry for what it is, Jeff Goodell was the one for the job.

Cool thinking about a hot topic
Right from the start, when author Jeff Goodell discusses daily life around a coal extraction site in Wyoming, "Big Coal" is a captivating look at a subject that is seemingly as ordinary...as a lump of coal. Goodell knows his subject. He has witnessed coal mining operations in West Virginia, Wyoming and China. He has interviewed government officials, regulators, environmentalists, mine operators and the miners themselves. He has witnessed the devastation of strip mining and spoken to people whose land is literally washing away from them. He has spoken to those whose livelihoods are dependent on coal, and who even get a thrill from pitting their lives against Mother Nature. He has detonated explosives that exposed coal seams, accompanied inspectors worriedly checking excavation sites for potentially-fatal weak spots and ridden the rails with those who transport coal across the country.

"Big Coal" details the thrills and dangers of mining, an occupation that has cost 100,000 lives since 1900. It discusses the geological forces that laid down the coal beds, the differences between grades of coal like bituminous and anthracite and the historical personalities that bequeathed us our power system. He tackles tough issues -- like the efforts to control their entry of coal by-products mercury and sulfur into the environment. He is not afraid to tell it like it is. To the current administration's contention that there are 250 years of coal in the ground (250 million years in the words of George W. Bush), Goodell counters with studies that show that fewer than 20 years' worth of that coal that is *economically* extractable. Goodell analyzes the devastating impact of burning carbon-rich coal on the global environment. CO2 being a greenhouse gas with enormous impact on climactic warming trends. Goodell lays out a compelling case for the folly of building more and more plants that belch more of the stuff into the atmosphere. Goodell details the way Big Coal ignores and fights this long range problem for short-term profit. Most depressingly, he relates the political enablers that allow Big Coal to persuade Americans that polluting their streams and wrecking their children's environment is good for them. He discusses the way foreign juggernauts like China and India are beginning to repeat America's coal-centered mistakes in their quest to become world economic leaders, and the decreasing leverage that a coal-hungry America has to counter this threat.

The last third of the book was the hardest to read. It described the political expediency and pure greed that induces the coal lobby and US politicians to ignore, minimize and paper over the true costs of burning coal. Easy, low-cost solutions that can reduce coal's effect on the environment are put off as long as possible so coal execs can get a few more years of profits from the black rock. The public is misled to keep shareholders happy and politicians in office. This section caused me to put the book down out of frustration with our greed-drive political system.

But do not despair. "Big Coal" lays out the entire complex picture of coal and the industry required to harvest and exploit it. The book is not an attempt to destroy the coal industry or to destroy America's technological leadership. It is a clear-eyed and straightforward assessment of a difficult and complex reality. Reading the book will help you understand the many facets of the way that coal keeps the global economy running and that will (without adequate protections) land us in a world of hurt. Goodell's even-handed and comprehensive appraisal of the issues that fuel the coal controversy may make him seem biased in the eyes of some. And he is biased, if by this one means that he values clean air and land, a future free of climate change and live miners living to healthy old age with their families. But he is always fully truthful.

"Big Coal" will help you understand the issues -- technological, political, moral and economical-- to be tied to getting our power from coal. The Black Rock employs tens of thousands, allows millions to live in luxury and enables our nation's technological success. Yet it poisons our children, warms our planet and takes or shortens the lives of hundreds of thousands. I appreciated "Big Coal" for its ability to lay out the facts without the smog of industry and political obfuscation that usually accompanies their telling. An excellent, quite readable and educational book.