A coal strip mine in eastern Montana, 1973. This mine was one of the objects of study for the environmental assessment team I worked for. Photo by Boyd Norton, National Archives, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Time and Opportunity
Today I’m looking back across half a lifetime, to when I lived in the lovely state of Montana. The year was 1978, and I was just setting out on my career in the field of environmental analysis. As a newly minted graduate of a multi-disciplinary studies program at the University of Montana, I was fortunate to land a job with the agency that oversaw mineral development in the Treasure State. This callow youngster was about to find out what it was like in the big leagues of high-stakes industrial development.
Montana historically had derived much of its wealth from mining—initially gold, silver, and copper. Now the boom times had moved out to the grasslands of eastern Montana’s Powder River Basin, a vast rural landscape devoted mostly to cattle grazing. Thick seams of sub-bituminous coal lay under this ranchland, the property of energy giants such as Peabody Coal, Westmoreland Resources, and other companies. Eight new coal strip mines were in the planning stages, which if approved would join ones already in operation in neighboring Wyoming.
Federal and state law required the preparation of environmental impact statements before these massive projects could proceed, which was where I came in. I was to work with a team of analysts from a variety of disciplines to evaluate the effect these giant gouges in the earth would have on soils, water, air quality, plant and animal life, and social conditions in nearby towns. We were all young graduates, each committed to holding the operators of these mines to the highest environmental standards possible.
Partway into writing our first report, our air quality analyst—I believe her name was Cindy--came up with a startling statement. She pointed out that the coal to be mined would ultimately enter the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, one of the combustion byproducts released from the electric generating plants which these mines fed. At the time it was well known that burning coal dumped particulate matter, sulfur dioxide, and other nasty chemicals into the atmosphere, but CO2 itself was not widely held to be a pollutant. So-called greenhouse gases were still an emerging field of study--James Hansen’s startling testimony before Congress on their effect of Earth’s climate was still a decade in the offing.
Although the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, had been on the books for eight years, I doubt that any environmental impact statement prepared under this law up to that time had considered carbon emissions from electric generating plants. My team member was proposing to break new ground, and at first I was a bit skeptical. I discussed the matter with several of my colleagues in the Interior Department who were cooperating with us on the study, and they advised against tackling the subject. Cindy made a solid case, however, so I decided to include her statement in our review draft. Now it would be up to my superiors over at the state capital to decide.
Helena, Montana, 1903. The former Last Chance Gulch has become the center of a thriving commercial district, thanks to the riches extracted from the surrounding landscape. The building on the right is the Power Block, where my environmental assessment team would be based 75 years later. The arched window of my fifth-floor office can be seen just behind the tall utility pole. Magazine photo courtesy Montana Historical Society.
My job with the state government entailed a move to Helena, Montana’s charming capital city of some 23,000 residents. The discovery of gold in Last Chance Gulch in 1864 created a classic western boomtown, but it took outside capital to turn Helena into the so-called “Queen City of the Rockies,” its stately stone office buildings and brick mansions replacing the shacks of prospectors and early merchants. My office was on the fifth floor of one of those downtown buildings, where I could look out at the remnants of that profligate era. Scattered all across the surrounding hillsides were old prospectors’ pits and adits, tottering headframes, and yards and yards of rusted cable—all of which testified to the pull that mineral wealth exerted on men’s minds.
Montana’s mining past included a less visible legacy--the so-called “copper collar” by which the Anaconda Copper Company held tight reins on the state legislature and most other aspects of life in the western part of the state. By the time I arrived in the state in 1974, the Company, as it was known, had relaxed its grip on state politics. A bunch of newly empowered activists had rewritten the state constitution to accord less privilege to large corporations, and they also persuaded the legislature to approve several new environmental laws, including a coal severance tax that would help mitigate the impacts of mining, and an act modeled on the federal NEPA, which required the kind of environmental analysis statements we were now preparing. This law had occasioned my employment, so I was pretty well committed to its principles of thorough, scientifically based analysis.
At the time, public awareness of climate change, if it existed at all, was directed at global cooling. A handful of scientific reports issued over the previous decade had raised the possibility that air pollution (in the form of tiny aerosol particles) might reflect a great deal of sunlight away from Earth, causing a significant drop in surface temperatures. The scientific consensus was beginning to shift, however. A 1975 article by geochemist Wallace Broecker, published in the prestigious journal Science, argued that increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would lead to measurable “global warming” by the turn of the century. His was apparently the first use of this term in the scientific literature.
In strip mining, giant electric draglines (background) are used to remove the "overburden" and expose the thick coal seams, which are then loaded into trucks by smaller machines. Peabody mine, Montana, 1970s. Photo by Boyd Norton, National Archives, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
In response to this and other emerging evidence, the National Academy of Sciences convened a panel of experts who in 1977 issued a stark warning: higher temperatures from emissions of Earth-warming greenhouse gases could lead to “catastrophic” consequences for human society, including rising sea levels and widespread crop failures. By this time the United States was burning more than 600 million tons of coal per year, most of it in electric generating plants. Dozens more such facilities were in the works, as well as new and untested methods of extracting synthetic fuels from low-grade deposits of oil shale. The effect of this consumption on the climate, though not well understood, was likely to be highly significant, and so merited discussion in our report.
My colleague had probably come across Broecker’s work in her graduate studies. But the path from scientific awareness to effective public policy would be strewn with obstacles, some placed deliberately by energy companies to confuse the public and deflect attention from the issue. Concern about a warming planet had not yet grown to the point that policy makers would even consider backing away from plans to build more coal-fired power plants. I learned this firsthand when my boss came into my office not long after I’d sent our draft analysis up the ladder for review. He told me that his superior had specifically singled out the air-quality section for revision, and that any mention of climate change from coal emissions must be struck from our report. I don’t recall what reasons he gave—mostly likely it was thought to be speculative or not germane to our mission. I disagreed, but the subject was not open to debate—not if I wanted to keep my job.
We went on to examine other coal mines as they came up for permitting reviews, although our analyses made no mention of their effect on the Earth’s climate. We were able to identify specific problems with the mines’ operating plans, such as how they would handle regrading, contouring, and reclamation, and had some success in resolving these issues. Working with the mining company’s project engineers often proved to be fruitful; generally these individuals were committed to doing the best job possible, given that the companies’ leaseholds gave them the right to mine the coal underneath the land surface.
We knew, however, that we were tinkering with details. The overall effects of mining that much coal would be severe—both at the scale of the mines themselves and regionally through such impacts as rapid population increases, changes in land use, and possible disruption of aquifers. Still, an overall moratorium on coal mining was never up for discussion. That target still eludes environmental reformers, although many power plants have since switched to cheaper natural gas—a fuel that burns cleaner but is only marginally better for the climate.
I occasionally ask myself what might have happened had I held my ground and insisted on including a climate analysis in our reports. Most likely it would have meant a change in employment, but even if it hadn’t, the coal mines and the power plants they fed would have continued to operate. No one in a position of authority--from the federal Department of the Interior down to the state lands department where I worked--was ready to give up the lucrative royalties, the hefty severance tax payments, and the high-paying jobs that large-scale coal strip mining brought into the state. In 1978, our raising the alarm about climate change would have fallen on proverbial deaf ears, as did the credible assertions of the handful of climatologists working on the issue.
The shift away from coal would be decades in coming, and it would be the availability of cheaper sources of power—eventually to include solar and wind—which spurred the transition. Our little group of would-be reformers was simply too early in making a tentative engagement with this issue. Or, perhaps, the rest of the world was too late. In temporizing about climate disruption for nearly half a century, the world’s industrial powers have boxed themselves into a difficult position—and we in America are still resisting the changes most scientists familiar with the issue believe are necessary.
The Colstrip strip mine from space, 1995. NASA photo.
I left my job in Helena in 1981 after our team had produced a half-dozen environmental impact statements on coal mines and other land development projects in Montana. Within a year, however, I was back at it, working as a consultant to the Department of the Interior in Washington, D.C., on a massive effort to rewrite the federal regulations governing strip mining. This job brought its own challenges, but once again our efforts were focused on the immediate impacts of coal mining, not the long-range effect of adding more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Not until 1988, when NASA scientist James Hansen appeared before a congressional panel in Washington, D.C., to warn about the danger of carbon emissions, did global warming begin to receive widespread public concern. Even then, governmental action to curb such emissions remained fitful and inconsistent.
Today we have much better modeling of our climate system, and the warnings have grown steadily more ominous, but the causes are still routinely denied by people of influence. The current administration in Washington is only now getting around to actions that should have been taken four decades ago. Coal production for electric power generation in the U.S. more than doubled from its 1978 level before beginning a long decline as power plants switched to cheap, cleaner-burning natural gas. By 2020, a year of economic slowdown, coal production from U.S. mines was only slightly lower than in 1978. Overall greenhouse gas emissions from electric power generation have declined 12 percent since 1990, partly from solar power and increases in end-use efficiency, but this reduction is nowhere near to achieving the rapid replacement of polluting power needed to keep the Earth from warming catastrophically. Production of other fossil fuels, notably petroleum, continues its upward path, with few (if any) politicians willing to brave the public’s wrath over higher prices at the pump.
Today we have much better modeling of our climate system, and the warnings have grown steadily more ominous, but the causes are still routinely denied by people of influence. The current administration in Washington is only now getting around to actions that should have been taken four decades ago. Coal production for electric power generation in the U.S. more than doubled from its 1978 level before beginning a long decline as power plants switched to cheap, cleaner-burning natural gas. By 2020, a year of economic slowdown, coal production from U.S. mines was only slightly lower than in 1978. Overall greenhouse gas emissions from electric power generation have declined 12 percent since 1990, partly from solar power and increases in end-use efficiency, but this reduction is nowhere near to achieving the rapid replacement of polluting power needed to keep the Earth from warming catastrophically. Production of other fossil fuels, notably petroleum, continues its upward path, with few (if any) politicians willing to brave the public’s wrath over higher prices at the pump.
U.S. coal consumption, 1950-2018. Note how the decline in coal use in recent decades has only brought consumption down to late-1970s levels. This represents 45 years of carbon emissions that could have been--should have been--curtailed. Graph from U. S. Energy Information Administration.
By 1985, discouraged by the Reagan administration’s anti-environmental agenda and receiving fewer and fewer consulting opportunities, I decided to pursue other work in the conservation field. I left Helena and lost contact with most of my former colleagues. My attention was recently drawn back, however, when I learned of a lawsuit that a group of Montana schoolchildren brought against the state government to reverse its head-in-the-sand policy on climate disruption. In 2020, sixteen young students ranging in age from 5 to 22 filed suit to overturn the state’s prohibition (by then enshrined in state law) on considering climate impacts in its energy permitting decisions. The students won in district court, chiefly by citing the provision in Montana’s 1972 constitution that guarantees its citizens the right to enjoy a “clean and healthful environment.” The state quickly appealed the district court’s ruling, and seasoned observers doubt it will stand--although to have won even this much is a landmark of sorts.
I took some satisfaction in reading about this ruling, remembering our team’s unsuccessful attempt more than four decades earlier to perform just such an analysis. Change is indeed slow, and too often runs retrograde, but climate impacts can no longer be easily swept under the rug. My sadness is for the time lost—time which could have been used to accelerate the change to renewables and prepare mining-dependent workers and their communities for the transition.
Starting out on my career, I felt a degree of optimism, believing that my work would have some small effect on an important environmental issue. I still harbor some hope that we will manage to avert the worst of the climate catastrophe, thanks to the efforts of a small army of scientists, journalists, writers, and organizers who have placed climate disruption on the agenda of many governments and non-governmental organizations. I only wish that I had recognized the importance of this issue much earlier.
Looking back, I doubt I could have done much to redirect the course of coal mining in my adopted state. All of us belong to a civilization built upon the limitless availability of cheap energy, which is a tough place to leave. With most Americans unwilling to give up their easy conveniences, it will be difficult to decarbonize our economy quickly enough to avoid significant environmental harm. The alarm bells have been ringing for so long that for many Americans they no longer register.
Still, I applaud the courage of those young Montanans who are determined to make a difference. They clearly feel a sense of urgency that was missing when I was their age. I wish them well. We will need all they have to offer, and much more.
* * *