Let’s forget about using coal

The most interesting discussion I had from last week’s articles was not about Lake Turkana and its impending death, but about coal.

A friend of mine who is a risk analyst for some of the firms engaged in cobbling together the energy deal in the Mui Basin chastised me for slating coal, which, he said, is “the future”.

He also pointed out that the dangers of coal lay in the mining stages, and not the incineration stage, which is where the firms he is working for will engaged.

It is notable that the first coal-fired plants plugged into the national grid will run on South African coal before switching to local sources.

Coal mining is hazardous, with thousands of miners dying or getting injured every year as a result of mine roofs caving in, landslides and explosions. And exposure to coal dust coats your insides with soot, leading to black lungs, which significantly affects your health.

My friend was wrong about the worst of coal. The slow-moving, certain plague that slowly suffocates the masses is from burning it, not mining it. The mining will kill hundreds, or if we are unlucky, thousands every year. The degraded air quality as a result of burning coal will kill hundreds of thousands.

Take China, the country most wedded to coal, for instance. It handles about 3,000 annual deaths from coal mining alone. Some people claim that the government understates the official figures of mining deaths. The cost to its collective lungs is far worse.

In a study it commissioned, Greenpeace last year showed that China could avoid a quarter of a million deaths from poor air quality annually if it shut down its coal plants. A quarter of a million deaths is a lot, even for the world’s most populous nation.

A former classmate also wheeling and dealing in the Mui Basin called to tell me he had seen environmental impact assessment reports, and that they said nothing about fertility. In my piece, I had said that coal would “rob women of their fertility”, so he wanted me to correct this “grievous” error, which would scare people in Kitui County.

However, processing coal and burning it unleashes a host of effluvial nasties into the environment. Coal plants are the leading source of mercury in rivers, and heavy metal poisoning is bad for the womb. He agrees that coal mining can cause mercury poisoning of nearby water sources.

Mercury poisoning causes low birth weight and impairs children’s brain function. Maybe coal won’t rob women of their fertility, it will just increase their chances of giving birth to premature, deformed babies because of mercury in the womb.

Although oil has captured Kenya’s imagination, we have a lot more coal than oil. Our oil wealth is valued in billions of shillings while coal is in the trillions.

According to the World Energy Council, the world has 848 billion tonnes of coal still in the ground; Kenya has at least one billion tonnes of the stuff in one county, meaning the Mui Basin is globally significant. Coal is going to be very big and very nasty business.

The question is, what happens to your atmosphere when you burn a billion tonnes of coal? We should remember that it is the systems around us that keep us alive.

The biosphere’s ability to absorb waste is priceless and should be weighed against a hungry people wanting to be lifted out of poverty. Forests and fish stocks, biodiversity and biosphere all have to be taken into consideration against profits to be made.

The Stockholm Resilience Centre reminds us that we have exceeded safe levels of the nitrogen cycle, pollution, carbon in the atmosphere, freshwater usage and ocean acidification, all of which will be made worse by mining coal.

The worst effects of coal will be felt by those living closest to the mines. A shift to the least carbon-intensive method of running electricity plants is in all our interests.

Dongo Kundu, with its gas-fired plant, is the ideal change we need, not the chimneys what will rise in Kitui. Coal is more than a thousand times worse in the environment just by the carbon emissions compared to natural gas.

Coal is also much worse for the environment than crude oil with regard to carbon emissions, so it would be better to stick to the huge diesel generators in Mombasa. Coal is reckoned to cheaper, but after the health costs are added up, it is anything but.

Clean coal is an uncertain prospect yet to be proved and has not been deployed anywhere yet. Yet we are told it will work in Kenya.

If clean coal is a reality, why do countries that heavily rely on the product to fire up electricity still have such dreadful air quality?

Granted, much this waste from the incinerators can be trapped using scrubbers and precipitators. But there are no completely safe ways of disposing of the waste.

Also, for us to truly find out whether clean coal is a reality, we would need to roll it out on a large scale first to see if it is commercially viable before making a decision. That is a bit like telling someone that the best way to find out whether a drug can cure a cancer is to first switch the patient from 20 to 40 cigarettes a day.

As it is, we cannot afford to burn all the fuel we have, yet we have discovered new ways of extracting fuel. There is an upper limit to the amount of coal we can fire up. If we burn all of it, we risk raising ocean levels.

I recently watched a BBC documentary titled Frozen Planet, which chronicles the challenges facing life at either extreme as the ice in the north gets brittle and the ice on the fringes of the South Pole recedes.

That water isn’t just disappearing into the ether; it is coming toward us.

We have a challenge generating energy from the best sources while at the same time reducing the impact of our activities on the biosphere and preventing climate change.

While our goal should be to wean ourselves off hydrocarbon and adopt renewable energy, liquefied natural gas gives more time to figure things out and perfect carbon-capturing methods that will eventually be deployed on coal. Dongo Kundu should be the future, not Kitui.

The question for us all is, which is Kitui’s main resource; is it coal or humans?

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Companies should also publish the ethnic composition of their workers

THERE WAS A report recently about the composition of the civil service and which jobs are occupied by which tribes.

It shouldn’t really be a surprise because I recall more than one such report being produced during the Mwai Kibaki presidency.

What we should concentrate on is the complexion at the very top. Our Cabinet, it is fair to say, is disproportionately stuffed with members of some tribes beyond their percentages in the national census.

Perhaps there are a few of different tribes that might be just as adept at pulling certain levers of power as the current bunch. The ship of state should have several hands on deck that represent the composition of its crew.

The idea that “nobody with a face and name like mine could land such a plum government job” saps the ambition of children and crushes the feeling that we, indeed, live in a representative democracy.

Merit isn’t the only important box worth ticking in doling out government jobs.

If Kenya wants to be a meritocracy, then we should advertise the job of president, and indeed, every job in the government internationally to get the best candidates.

We already tinkered with the Constitution to land women in Parliament to ensure that their voices are represented in the floor of the House.

The next step should of course be to get all public companies to publish the ethnic composition of their workers and file them with the registrar of companies. Why demand that only boardrooms be gender-friendly but not represent the face of Kenya?