Imagine having to live under the towering smokestack of a dirty coal-fired power plant in your neighborhood. Imagine the asthmatic child watching her friends play outside while she can't. Imagine a mom who can't afford to pay for her son's medication. Imagine the factory worker who can't make it into work because of the bronchitis, asthma attacks, or the heart condition that shortens his life and threatens his livelihood.
These tragic stories are being played out here in our community. You don't have to imagine the layer of smog that often shadows our expansive views along the Colorado Rockies. That shadow is fueled by dirty coal-fired power plants like the Martin Drake in downtown Colorado Springs, threatening the lives of countless families by sending toxic mercury, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, and carbon pollution into the air and water.
While Coloradans can't always see coal's pollution in the air and water, we can see their damage in the cases of lung and heart disease attributed to these pollutants. According to the Clean Air Task Force, coal pollution in the United States costs us more than $100 billion annually in health costs and causes more than 12,000 emergency room visits per year. The estimated health cost caused by pollution from Martin Drake alone was more than $65 million in 2010.
Women and children are particularly at risk from mercury — one of the most toxic pollutants emitted from coal-fired power plants. Mercury travels from coal-plant smokestacks to clouds, to rivers and lakes, to fish and aquatic animals. Exposure to toxic mercury results in nerve and brain damage, heart disease and endocrine system dysfunction in wildlife and humans. Coal-burning power plants result in our largest man-made source of mercury contamination in the environment.
Recent studies suggest that as the rate of global mercury pollution rises, the incidence of mercury-associated neurodegenerative diseases, such as autism and Alzheimer's disease, are rising as well. One in every 100 American children is impacted by autism, resulting in heavy personal, family and societal costs. Eliminating mercury pollution will protect our children's ability to learn and live long and prosperous lives.
Fortunately, after years of delay, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency enacted new safeguards that will reduce mercury pollution from coal-fired power plants by more than 90 percent nationwide. The new EPA mercury and air toxics standards will save $410 million to $990 million in annual health costs for Colorado alone.
The EPA is continuing to cut back on toxic air pollution from coal. This month, the EPA will establish new safeguards under the Clean Air Act to protect Americans from dangerous carbon pollution produced by new coal plants. Carbon pollution is the main contributor to climate disruption and is linked to life-threatening air pollution like asthma-inducing smog, making it a serious hazard to Americans' health and future. The new EPA carbon pollution protections will allow EPA to focus on the industries that create the lion's share of the nation's carbon pollution — like dirty coal plants — and will also help reduce life-threatening air pollutants like soot, smog and mercury.
Through these common-sense protections, our nation can reduce dangerous carbon emissions as well as the toxic soot, smog and mercury that make their way from dirty coal plants to our air and water.
Colorado is on the forefront of clean energy innovation, with more than 350 jobs created in GE's new thin-film solar facility in Aurora, which is set to produce modules in 2013. The eventual annual production capacity of the facility, 400 megawatts of electricity, will be enough to power 80,000 homes with stable electricity rates. And the city of Denver has launched the Clean Air Clean Jobs initiative to ramp up even more investment in the green tech sector.
It's time to imagine a Colorado with thousands of sustainable clean energy jobs, clean air, and clean water. We need to move Colorado beyond dirty coal, and support the EPA's carbon pollution safeguards that clean up and modernize the way we power our country.
Eric Uram is executive director for SafeMinds. Bryce Carter is with the Sierra Club.