Power and Smoke: A Nation Built on Coal. Stephen Smith: From American Public Media, this is an American Radio. Works documentary. Barack Obama: We are the Saudi Arabia of coal.
Texas Public Radio (TPR) operates public radio stations broadcasting to the San Antonio metropolitan area and West Central Hill Country. KGNU Independent Community Radio broadcasting at 88.5 FM in Boulder and 1390 AM in Denver. Listener supported, volunteer powered community radio. We've got more coal than just about anybody else. Coal has shaped America's history. Barbara Freese: They saw all of this coal here as a gift from God further evidence of our manifest destiny. But coal's power came at a price. Mary Janet Henry: There was always that sulfur smell in the air. Joel Tarr: There were days when street lights had to be turned on at midday because smoke pollution was so heavy. Today, city skies are clearer, but carbon dioxide from coal is warming the planet. I'm Stephen Smith. First, this news. Carnegie Mellon University Professor Joel Tarr is a pioneer in the field of urban environmental history. He showed producer Catherine Winter a slide show that he put together on Pittsburgh and coal. Edited by Chris Julin. I'm down in a sort of touristy waterfront area where people are feeding bread to the gulls and waiting for the aerial bridge to lift so that a cargo ship can pass from Lake Superior through this pretty narrow shipping canal into the harbor. Tregurtha is one of thirteen ships on the Great lakes called . It towers above us, many stories high, and if you stood it on end it would be a skyscraper more than a thousand feet high. Announcer: They are going to the Midwest Energy terminal to load with about 6. Now, the coal comes to Duluth from the West where most of America's coal is mined these days - not in the Appalachians. It arrives in Duluth on trains, and then it gets loaded onto these huge ships and sent down the Great Lakes. Nearly 1. 9 million tons of coal passed through this harbor last year. Some of the coal goes to factories, but most of it goes to make electric power. Nearly half the electricity in the United States comes from burning coal. We depend on coal for luxuries and necessities - really, for our very survival. But burning coal pumps out pollution. It's a major contributor to the heat- trapping gases that are leading to climate change. Coal produces more carbon dioxide than other fossil fuels for the same amount of energy produced. In the next hour, we're going to look at how America became so addicted to coal; how our fuel choices have changed American culture and history; and we'll explore what we can do about our dependence on coal today. Producer Catherine Winter has the story. Catherine Winter: You can look at history from a lot of angles: Who won the wars; who sailed to where; who got elected. One question that can lead you to some surprising insights is: What were they burning? If you look at how people heated their homes, or what power source they used to make furniture or build buildings or get themselves around, you notice that the fuel people choose has a profound effect on their lives. Dig into American history this way, and right away, you hit a thick vein of coal. Go back to the early days of radio, and you strike coal. It's that his listeners were - and his sponsors knew it. Radio Announcer: Before we join the Shadow in today's adventure, here's a proposition: Regardless of what coal you're burning in your furnace, order a ton of blue coal. Try blue coal for a week and see if it doesn't give you more even, more dependable, longer lasting heat! That's fair enough, isn't it? Coal heated homes and ran factories in the 1. American forces fighting in World War II. A year into the war, President Roosevelt called for an end to a mining strike. Franklin D. Roosevelt: It is inconceivable that any patriotic miner can choose any course other than going back to work, and mining coal! Decades later, in the 1. Americans looked to coal to save them from an energy crisis and oil embargos. Television Announcer: To meet our growing demand in the future we must find an abundant energy source here in this country We already have that energy. Now, in the 2. 1st century, coal is still powering the United States. Obama: This is America. We figured out how to put a man on the moon in ten years. You can't tell me we can't figure out how to burn coal, that we mine right here in the United States of America, and make it work. We can do that. America is a country built on coal - literally. President Obama and a lot of other people have called the United States the . So you might imagine that the first European settlers to reach North America were thrilled to find all that coal. You can picture them firing it up to heat their cabins and grind their grain and run their looms. The funny thing is: they didn't. Americans ignored their vast coal deposits long after coal was widely used in England. Londoners complained about coal smoke during Queen Elizabeth I's era. A century before the American Revolution, in 1. Englishman named John Evelyn published one of the world's first treatises on air pollution. He complained for pages about coal in London. Actor: That this Glorious and Antient city should wrap her stately head in Clowds of Smoake and Sulphur, so full of Stink and Darknesse, I deplore with just Indignation. People would have preferred to burn wood to keep warm and cook food. Wood smoke smelled sweeter. But they had cut down the forests of England. Only rich people could have roaring wood fires. So it's no surprise that when Europeans arrived in America, the natural resource they were excited about wasn't coal; it was wood. America had vast expanses of forest. Puritan minister Francis Higginson wrote about it: Actor: Though it be somewhat cold in the winter, yet here we have plenty of fire to warm us, and that a great deal cheaper than they sell billets and fagots in London; nay, all Europe is not able to afford to make so great fires as New- England. A poor servant here, that is to possess but fifty acres of land, may afford to give more wood for timber and fire as good as the world yields, than many noblemen in England can afford to do. Settlers in America cleared land for farms, and burned the wood. Wood was easy, and America's coal was hard to get at. It was on the other side of mountains, and there weren't railroads or canals yet. And once Americans finally began to develop factories in the 1. And built them where there were rivers with enough force. David Nye: So it's not Boston, but Lowell, in Massachusetts, which is the first big American industrial town. Historian David Nye is the author of . Nye says by using water power, Americans wound up with very different lives than people in England had. Instead of concentrated, smoky industrial cities run on coal, America had small factory towns scattered along rivers - towns like Lowell. Nye: It was a tourist attraction and Andrew Jackson - then President of the United States - made a special detour to see the Lowell factories when he made a tour of New England because that was a significant sight, something he'd never seen: a whole town of factories. Nye's book talks about how in its first centuries, America relied on water power and muscle power: Mules and horses and humans used their muscles to plow fields and make furniture and transport goods. It wasn't a lot of power. And that meant Americans didn't have a lot of extra material goods. Nye says historians can tell what people owned by looking at their wills. Nye: They'll list things like, one gun, you know, one bed, one plow; very specific things which suggests that under miscellaneous there must be very small things indeed. People didn't own much, and they made much of what they did have themselves. They didn't have buying power, or things to buy - until they harnessed the power of coal. American settlers who pushed west, across the Appalachians, discovered an astonishing abundance of coal. George Washington himself wrote about it. He passed through the area where the Monongahela and Allegheny Rivers join together and form the Ohio River, and he noticed coal right on the surface. You could walk up and kick it. Because of coal, the fort at the river forks was destined to become a major industrial city - the city of Pittsburgh. Muller: By the time you get to the 1. From that point on this is the city people think it is. The city of iron and eventually mass- produced steel. As Pittsburgh developed, the rest of the country began to want coal, too. One big reason Americans developed canals and railroads was to get coal from one place to another. And this is where Americans began using steam engines in earnest - to run trains and boats. A steamboat could move upstream without mules to haul it. Steam power was convenient - and it was dangerous. Nye: The science of building steam engines was not so understood, so occasionally steamboat engines would blow up, like a bomb going off. Historian David Nye. Nye: I mean there was no chance to get out of the way. If you happened to be nearby, you were going to be killed. Steamboat explosions were a real plague in America in the 1. Some people in the 1. Barbara Freese: Coal has always been seen in this dualistic way. Some people saw it as a gift from God, and others really connected it with evil. Barbara Freese is the author of . So it was seen really as further evidence of our manifest destiny. In 1. 84. 1, a man from Cincinnati named Charles Crist wrote about a visit to Pittsburgh. He described how it looked to an approaching traveler. As he enters the manufacturing region, the hissing of steam, the clanking of chains, the jarring and grinding of wheels and other machinery, and the glow of melted glass and iron, and burning coal beneath, burst upon his eyes and ears in concentrated force. The soot and noise are the tax citizens must pay, he says, . But the use of the steam engine was growing. In 1. 87. 6, Pennsylvania played host to an awesome display of this new power. Freese: In 1. 87. Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. And it was of course it was celebrating the fact that the nation was a century old but it was also in retrospect kind of a. And they were connected by something like eight miles of connecting shaft to one giant steam engine in the middle. Current Affairs - Tune. In Radio. Here and Now (NPR)Produced every weekday in Boston, this is a fast- paced program that covers up- to- the- minute news and also provides regular features on food and cooking, science and technology, and personal finance, as well as cultural stories about film, theater..
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