A little trip out west--x

A couple of weekends ago, for a couple of hours along the Union Pacific lines, I couldn't help being astounded by clockwork and the sheer number of trains passing by, one after another after another, on their way east, like this one, heavy laden with coal, while, not twenty feet away, the empties were returning with a steely clatter. 

The sheer size of this country, our country, and its immense appetites, still strikes awe in me. This heavyweight processionals DID NOT QUIT. Huge trains, hundreds of cars long, each of car perfectly sculpted with piles of coal created so similarly that no human hand could have shaped the cargo or shoveled the cars full. Somewhere west, massive coal deposits were being cut out of the earth and loaded on to boxcars that carried all that coal--where? out east somewhere. Out east, period. 

I'm not as green as I should be. I believe in climate change only because the science types I know and trust tell me it's absolutely true, people who understand and also see this creation around us as belonging, first and foremost, to Him (upper case). If they tell me we have a major problem, if they're scared, I worry. 

What little I know about coal is that it isn't nice and it's not the fuel of the future--or at least so my friends say. It's quintessential fossil fuel, and it's not clean. So I'm out there on the Oregon Trail where freight train after freight train are lugging mountains of coal somewhere east, and I'm thinking about fat cat American appetites.  

I've got a friend, happens to be a pastor, who's a train aficionado, loves 'em, sits here, outside, and just can't help but smile when our local BSNF rumbles by. I asked him about what I couldn't help notice on, of all things, the Oregon Trail. Where's all this sinful coal coming from and where is it going?

It's Powder River Basin coal, he said. The only thing I knew about the Powder River was that once upon a time it was maybe the last stronghold--certainly the last hunting grounds--of the Lakota and Northern Cheyenne people. I didn't know it was full of coal.

Forty percent of America's coal is loaded on those freights because forty percent of America's coal originates in open pit mines cut out of the earth in the Powder River Basin. You might be surprised to know--as I was--that the state of Wyoming produces more coal than any other state in the Union. Trump famously rallied coal miners, didn't he? But I don't think he was anywhere near the Powder River Basin.

But what little I knew of coal suggested to me that it was evil, that the world is going to be far better off when it stops using fossil fuels, right? With that flimsy base of knowledge, I watched those trains almost ritually passing and shook my head because all those trains made it perfectly clear that weaning ourselves from coal wasn't going to happen tomorrow. There were simply too many trains, too much coal, too great a need. Shame, shame.

But my preacher friend made clear to me that Powder River coal was just about the best kind of coal we can burn. It's low sulfur content make if far, far less harmful to the environment. The truth of the matter is that nobody even bothered to mine that low-sulfur stuff until environmentalists raised cane about its Appalachian cousins, which is far, far more dirty. So it's only recently that these immense trains ran up and down the trail 24/7. 

Okay, the pathetic environmentalist in me says that Powder River stuff is not so sinful after all. But where really does it go? Well, all over for starters.

Just so happens, as you can imagine, that the Oregon Trail is the beginning of the pilgrimage--make that plural because, as you can see, it does go all over. 

Even here--Edgewater Power Plant, Sheboygan, Wisconsin, burns Powder River coal. I had no idea. 

Thirty years ago, I used to get up early on Saturday mornings, drive out here, pull on my waders, and fish right off the shore because 'twas rumored that the power plant emitted warm water into Lake Michigan, warm water the salmon loved. Now that may have been true. I may have caught one or two on those Saturday mornings, but then I'm even less a fisherman than I am a train buff.

The thing is, I know this place. I've been there, right there, often. So the endless processional of low-sulfur coal from what was once prime buffalo country, the Powder River Basin, ends up being burned just down the road from the town where I was born and reared. 

Amazing, I thought. I was burning that coal. I was using fossil fuel ravaged from the landscape out in Montana. It wasn't just some yahoo who thought wind turbines or solar gardens somehow less manly. I was the red neck.

The news, announced in May of this year, is that by 2023, power from the Edgewater plant, Sheboygan, Wisconsin, will come from wind and solar sources. No more Powder River coal. 

Which means no more open pit mining and no more Union Pacific freights pulling endless cars full of low-sulfur coal. 

That's what I learned on the Oregon Trail.