Twenty-five miners are dead and four more missing following Monday’s explosion at the Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia. Besides being the deadliest mining accident since at least 1984 (maybe earlier), the blast brings a new wave of bad PR to the mining industry, and the company that owns the mine, Massey Energy.
All of which poses a delicate question: do such disasters help the cause of renewable energy, by giving fossil fuel a reputation in the public’s mind as a dirty, dangerous and out-of-date industry run by uncaring slave masters?
America’s biggest environmental disaster, the Exxon Valdez oil spill, happened before the current renewable energy era. If such a disaster happened today would it give clean energy a bump the same way high gas prices do? Would Americans be more willing to pay for cap-and-trade?
Clean energy and climate blogs have leapt on the W. Virginia disaster (here, here, and here), but mainly to report the facts, the implied message being: this sort of thing doesn’t happen at solar power plants (although..). For instance, Climateprogress.org, a leading liberal climate blog, has taken a break from its perpetual battle against global-warming deniers to slam mine operator Massey for ignoring safety concerns.
Ellen Smith, owner of Mine Safety and Health News, said “from an environmental standpoint, these mine disasters certainly bring into question the cost of coal. They cause people to look at the industry in ways they haven’t before.”