Chuck Frank of The Sierra Club Foundation Board attended the Chicago EPA hearing on September 16:
“At the hearing, industry representatives were far outnumbered and read impassioned prepared statements. Private citizens spoke emotionally of personal and community tragedies from groundwater and airborne pollution, which has caused heartbreaking health issues for them and their families and also has despoiled family farms as the soil was destroyed. Not only did this ruin their family business, livelihood, and way of life, but pollution has also destroyed their land values in an already-depressed market.
I don’t believe that I heard one person independent of the industry even attempt to argue that the waste was NOT harmful to human health. It was all about the money and how stipulating waste as a toxic substance would affect businesses and jobs and raise the cost of cement and some fertilizers. What I didn’t hear (and wanted to say myself) is that we need to consider the cost to our society of the health effects on insurance rates and hospital costs when uninsured individuals go to emergency rooms with ailments caused by coal ash. And how about the cost to businesses of absenteeism on productivity rates from ill employees? And what consideration is given to the loss of real estate values to those who live near these plants? Not only do we as citizens pay for all this through taxes and higher insurance and health care costs, but we actually subsidize coal through the tax system! We are incentivizing the industry to make us all sick.
I believe that if the electricity produced were priced with the real costs to society it would be more than that of clean alternatives, and we would see green alternatives grow substantially in a competitive environment. Let the free market reign, but let’s do it with fully-costed alternatives. In the process, we’d produce lots of new jobs here in the USA.”
I believe that if the electricity produced were priced with the real costs to society it would be more than that of clean alternatives, and we would see green alternatives grow substantially in a competitive environment. Let the free market reign, but let’s do it with fully-costed alternatives. In the process, we’d produce lots of new jobs here in the USA.”
