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Old King Coal

History and Commentary from a Prairie Perspective

When I was a very small child, my mother's father told me that his youngest brother had crossed the ocean to a far place and had never come back again. His name was Septimus, the seventh son, and while my grandfather laboured in the coal-fed industrial zone which grew up along the Tees River, Septimus became a miner, at first in County Durham and then in the coal fields of Yorkshire. He left England to go to the hard-coal mines of Appalachia. The memory is faded. I don't know whether Septimus perished in an explosion or a cave in and I don't know where or when. He was one of many who died in feeding the coal and steam economy of a century ago. I imagine his mortal remains are in an overgrown cemetery in West Virginia on the outskirts of a tumbledown village that has no inhabitants. Indeed, there are ghost towns in Appalachia, but the long trains carrying anthracite coal are still running.

An armada of clumsy sailing ships, the collier-brigs, took coal from Newcastle to London all through the Napoleonic Wars, facing the threat of capture by French privateers and the impressments of their crews into the undermanned Royal Navy. The greatest dangers they faced, however, were the wild North Sea gales. In 1838, Jonathon Wardill II, a sea-going evangelist, was captain of the coal-brig Anegoria. His God granted him a peaceful death in his own bed, unlike the many other collier men who perished in the cold, raging waters of the North Sea.

The deaths of the men who went down with their ships are recorded. There is no record of the Londoners who died because of the choking brown fogs generated by coal stoves and illuminating gas, which was itself a product of heated coal. Throughout the Gaslight Era, which began in 1812, buildings in London were stained by fumes and the Thames River became a toxic soup.

Wherever coal is mined on a large scale there have been conflicts between miners and owners. The most vicious conditions in North America were in the anthracite mines of Pennsylvania in the 19th century. There, the owners of the mines also owned the railroads, the Coal and Iron Police and the justice system. Miners lived in company- owned shacks. (If a miner died because of disease or accident, his family was evicted.)

Miners bought overpriced goods at company stores. When their meagre wages were drastically cut, they went on strike. They wanted better wages and better working conditions. They wanted a union. They failed and were forced back to work. A secret society, the Mollie Maguires, came to the defence of the Irish miners who suffered more indignities at the hands of the owners than miners from any other place. There was a reign of terror. In the end, 10 men accused of being members of the Mollie Maguire conspiracy were executed and others were imprisoned.

There was a strike in the Souris Valley coalfields of Saskatchewan in the fall of 1931. The immediate cause was a drastic cut in the pay. Other causes of discontent were virtually the same as they had been in Pennsylvania in the previous century. In spite of their obvious grievances the strikers had no support except from the communist-led Workers' Unity League. The strike failed. Three miners were killed by police bullets, others were wounded, many were arrested.

The Souris Valley lignite coal still feeds Saskatchewan's large electric generators and coal-fed power plants in Ontario as well. Saskatchewan has invested in "clean coal technology," which captures and stores carbon dioxide. Whether this technology will be able to compete economically with other methods in the energy mix remains to be seen.

Working conditions, incomes and safety measures in the coalfields have improved greatly, except in China. There the same choking fogs that plagued London during the Gaslight Era are increasing in frequency at the same time as new coal-fired power plants are being commissioned. Some progress is being made. The massive Three Gorges flood control project is now generating enough electricity to eliminate the burning of 50 million tons of coal every year.

The sun began to shine on London and fish returned to the Thames in the decade after 1967 when natural gas from the North Sea displaced coal and coal gas. The supply is depleting now and the British gas system is receiving gas from the Norwegian fields and from a fleet of liquefied natural (LNG) gas tankers.

Liquefied natural gas terminals are now sprouting along the coasts of China. Much of the gas comes from North America. It includes shale gas from the United States produced by the process called fracking. Oil burns cleaner than coal and gas burns cleaner than oil, but whether natural gas can be a solution to global energy needs is uncertain. Information about the future energy mix is like an unsavoury soup compounded from science, false science and monumental falsehoods. Coal is being phased out in power plants in parts of Canada. In certain jurisdictions in the United States, fracking is banned as an environmental hazard. Until an honest, focused approach is taken to future energy needs, more and more LNG tankers will be threading through the coastal waters on North America. It's inevitable.