Reshaping China's Coal Industry

SURELY NO NATION ON EARTH has as many coal miners or coal mines as China. In 1996, 5 million Chinese mined coal, virtually all of them underground. At the same time in the United States, about 90,000 miners were digging about the same amount of coal. The reason for the disparity, of course, is that Chinese mines rely much more on cheap labor than on costly machines. In addition to its many large mines, China has tens of thousands of tiny mines that each employ just a handful of miners.* The small mines are vastly more deadly than the big mines, which are themselves quite dangerous. In 1991, a particularly bad year, 10,000 Chinese coal miners died in accidents. By comparison, the number of Americans killed in coal mining in 1992, a bad year for the U.S. industry, was fifty-one.

*In 1998, China had about 75,000 mines employing an average of thirteen miners each. These small mines have a death rate seven times higher than the large ones.

... As they are in the United States and other coal-producing nations, the small inefficient mines are shutting down in favor of larger ones. In China, though, the scale of the disruption is mind-boggling: Beijing claims to have closed down 30,000 small mines just since 1998. Although the true number is surely less, there are undeniably painful reforms underway that have already thrown perhaps a million Chinese coal miners out of work.* These sweeping changes reflect the fundamental shift in Beijing's economic philosophy over the years: In a move more reminiscent of J. P. Morgan than Mao Zedong, the Communist government is now openly urging coal companies to merge into larger and larger enterprises, and to form "cartels" to limit overproduction and improve profitability.

*According to widespread reports, many communities have defied Beijing and quietly reopened their small mines; as a result, several officially "closed" mines have suffered deadly mining accidents in recent years. However, reports that miners are being laid off in huge numbers, including at large state-run mines, are more credible. Between 1992 and 1995, reportedly 883,000 coal miners (more than ten times the total U.S. coal mining workforce) were laid off, and there are plans to lay off nearly 800,000 more.

SOURCE: Coal: A Human History, by Barbara Freese (Penguin, 2003), pp. 207-208, 221-222

Reshaping the U.S. Coal Industry

THERE MAY BE NO POLLUTANT in all of history that people have worked harder to defeat than sulfur dioxide. In the United States alone the battle against it has absorbed years of effort and billions of dollars. Although it is nowhere near won, it has already utterly transformed the coal industry. It has also created deep political fissures between states and regions, as local fortunes rise and fall and as states struggle to decide how much they are willing to sacrifice to fight this invisible foe and to stop 11 killing their downwind neighbors.

Coal provides just over half the electricity for the United States, with huge and politically important regional variations. Many states, especially in the coal-producing regions, get virtually all their electricity from coal; others, especially on the West Coast and in New England, burn next to none. They rely instead on the three power sources that make up almost all the other half of the nation's electricity—hydroelectric dams, nuclear power, and natural gas—though sometimes they also import coal-fired electricity from other states. However, the number of people a state's coal plants actually sicken or kill (and the amount of acid rain and lost visibility they cause) depends not just on how much coal they burn bur on the kind of coal they use and how they burn it.

People who run coal-fired power plants can cut their SO₂ emissions in two ways: They can scrub, or they can switch.... It's often cheaper and a lot easier, though, just to switch to a kind of coal containing less sulfur. This option has caused some painful changes to the traditional U.S. coal industry by wrenching much of it away from the high-sulfur coal fields of the East and moving it to the low-sulfur coal fields of the West. Western coal has always been easier to dig because it lies in thick seams near the surface; but it is younger and generally packs less of an energy punch than the older eastern coals. In 1970, before environmental laws made sulfur content so important, only a tiny, share of U.S. coal came from west of the Mississippi. Today, more than half of it does, and the growing western low-sulfur coal fields are continuing to drain business away from the suffering high-sulfur eastern fields. Wyoming, with its vast surface mines, is now the nation's top coal-producing state. One result of the shift is that the coal industry can no longer view the environmental movement solely as a threat; the western coal fields, at least, owe much of their growth to environmental laws, and could benefit even more from stricter SO₂ limits.

The shift to the western United States has transformed this ancient industry in other ways, too. Even though coal fueled the rise of the machine in virtually every sector of the economy, the extraction of coal (as opposed to mine drainage or coal transportation) long depended far more on manual labor than on machines. Today, though, nearly two-thirds of American coal comes from surface mines, where it has been scooped up by some of the world's most gargantuan machines. This mechanized mass production has helped make the direct cost of coal incredibly cheap by any measure.

The mechanization of mining has also devastated the work force. Because only the largest mines can afford to mechanize, the smaller mines that characterized the soft-coal industry for so much of the twentieth century have finally been driven out. More than three-quarters of the coal mines operating in the United States in 1976 have closed, and the current work force of 72,000 coal miners is less than a third of what it was a quarter century ago. The once mighty UMW now represents a mere 20,000 miners, who produce less than a fifth of American coal.

SOURCE: Coal: A Human History, by Barbara Freese (Penguin, 2003), pp. 177-180

Anthracite Elites vs. Bituminous Boondocks

THE 1902 STRIKE [in the anthracite fields of northern Pennsylvania] served to emphasize how the nation had divided into clean anthracite cities like New York, Philadelphia, and Boston, and dirty bituminous ones, like Pittsburgh, Chicago, St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Birmingham.* In New York City, as the strike-induced shortage caused anthracite prices to rise, more and more coal users turned to bituminous, violating city laws and alarming city residents. Some plants allegedly switched to bituminous after dark when the smoke would attract less attention. In June of that year, the New York Times carried the distressing headline "Smoke Pall Hangs Over the Metropolis," something that was true every day in the soft-coal cities. A letter to the editor, bemoaning the growing illegal use of bituminous during the strike, asked, "Are we to have fastened on us the frightful infliction which curses Pittsburg and Chicago?" Andrew Carnegie, the steel magnate whose bituminous-burning mills in Pittsburgh added greatly to that city's "frightful infliction," chose to live in New York City, and warned: "If New York allows bituminous coal to get a foothold, the city will lose one of her most important claims to pre-eminence among the world's great cities, her pure atmosphere."

Pure atmospheres were something most bituminous cities had not seen, and would not see, for a very long time. Most of the bituminous cities saw their coal smoke as the inevitable byproduct of industry, and saw industry as the source not merely of their material wealth but of modern civilization itself. And yet, this belief was not unshakeable. By the late nineteenth century, it was starting to clash with other firmly held attitudes that linked civilized life to cleanliness, beauty, health, and ultimately morality. In short, coal smoke was coming into conflict with an emerging environmental philosophy.

*In fact, nearly every city west of the Appalachians depended heavily on bituminous except the emerging cities in Texas and California, where oil and natural gas were locally available. The reason was the cost of transportation; bituminous was mined in some twenty states by 1900, anthracite only in eastern Pennsylvania. In St. Louis, for example, anthracite could cost four times more than soft coal from the mines of Illinois.

SOURCE: Coal: A Human History, by Barbara Freese (Penguin, 2003), pp. 148-149

Wood-burning Trains: "A Storm of Fiery Snow"

Anthracite country is often called the cradle of American railroading, and with good reason. Apart from a couple of relatively minor exceptions, the anthracite mine operators were the first Americans to use rails, and they greatly advanced the science of building railways. White and Hazard built a nine-mile rail line from their Summit mine down to the Lehigh [River] in 1827. Gravity carried the coal cars and a carload of mules (who refused to walk down once they had experienced rail travel), down to the Lehigh, and then the mules pulled the cars back up.

Rails spread quickly throughout the anthracite region, and the rest of the East, and eventually locomotives followed. Schuylkill county had more track than any other small area in the country. Companies building railroads alongside the canals drained away canal business and bought up much of the region's coal property. The Philadelphia and Reading Railroad, one of the nation's largest and most powerful companies, dominated the area, but there would be five railways so intermingled with th anthracite trade that coal and railroading were often considered a single industry.

Surprisingly, these trains didn't run on coal. For the first few decades, American trains burned wood, even those that existed for the purpose of hauling coal. Anthracite did not burn well in locomotive fireboxes as they were then designed, and the bituminous fields were not yet widely exploited outside of Pittsburgh. Wood was bulky and burned fast, though, so the trains had to stop often to refuel. All along the tracks, people made money cutting wood to sell to the railroads—just one more way that trains would help turn the United States from a forested nation into an agricultural and industrial one.

The era of wood-burning trains is one that train buffs look back on with particular nostalgia. With clean-burning wood, locomotives could be much flashier: They were painted bright red and fitted with polished brass ornamentation. Engineers were flashier, too, often wearing ornate suits and vests with shiny buttons. When the switch to bituminous coal occurred later in the century, the inevitable accumulation of soot and grime meant that engines had to be painted plain black, and engineers switched to overalls. Some say that when the engineer's uniform was toned down, his status as a workman fell, too.

One problem with the shiny, wood-burning engines proved hard to ignore: They spewed out a continuous shower of sparks and cinders wherever they went, "a storm of fiery snow," as Charles Dickens called it when he visited the United States. It was a beautiful display at night, but it had a predictable downside. Wood-burning trains commonly set nearby fields and forests ablaze; some said the trains burned more wood outside the firebox than inside.

SOURCE: Coal: A Human History, by Barbara Freese (Penguin, 2003), pp. 121-123

Coal Ships as the Royal Navy's Nursery

By the time of the industrial revolution, Britain already had a relatively sophisticated transportation network. This was partly because of its accommodating waters, but partly because of its coal. As the heaviest and bulkiest of daily necessities, coal was the nation's cutting edge cargo, the one that kept forcing it to find new ways to move things.

It was noted in the 1600s that "it is the great quantities of Bulksome Commodities that multiplies ships and men," and commodities didn't get more bulksome than coal. And so, as the coal trade grew in the latter half of the 1500s and in the 1600s, so did the nation's shipping fleet. Already in the early 1600s, more ships were used to move coal than everything else combined. England would no doubt eventually have developed its shipping industry without the impetus of the coal trade; but London's growing dependence on coal left it no choice in the matter, and surely accelerated the nation's maritime investment. Once they had built the ships, the ports, the sailing fleet, and the skills required for the coal trade, the English found it much easier to expand their maritime trade to other commodities and other locations. According to one historian, "the coal trade may be regarded, in short, as a magnet which helped to draw Englishmen to seek their profit and their livelihood in ocean commerce."

The expansion of England's private fleet would prove vital not just commercially but militarily, too. Despite being an island nation, England had not always been a maritime power. Henry VIII built its first real Royal Navy, but it was not strong, and in times of trouble, the nation had to commandeer private vessels: Elizabeth I's navy was more powerful than her father's, but even so, it needed the help of dozens of armed merchant ships to defeat the Spanish Armada in 1588. England's coal ships were particularly important for national defense, and by the early 1600s it was axiomatic that the coal trade was the "chief nursery" for English seamen. Although there were more vessels involved in fishing, they were smaller and of less use to the navy. The sturdier coal ships, with their larger crews, were a vital national asset and could be called up quickly when needed. And when called upon, there was no refusing; the coal ships and their thousands of crew members were pressed into service, by force, many times in English history. In fact, in times of war, those involved in the coal trade demanded additional wages because they ran such a high risk of being forced into the navy.

Paradoxically, the coastal coal trade was another reason a navy was so important in the first place. London and the south of England had become dependent on this fragile lifeline to the north, subject to attack by pirates and foreign powers. The navy was frequently dispatched to escort the coal vessels, in convoys, down the English coast. Still, the coastal coal trade was seen not mainly as a vulnerability but as a national asset, and it came to enjoy what one historian called "an almost superstitious reverence" as the source of England's naval strength. There were even those in the 1600s who opposed trying to find inland coal supplies closer to London because it would have choked off the precious coastal trade.

SOURCE: Coal: A Human History, by Barbara Freese (Penguin, 2003), pp. 85-87