Jim Castagnera: Is the Mine Disaster’s “Back Story” Aesop’s Fable?

The “Back Story,” as the media like to call it, behind last week’s West Virginia mine disaster is how important coal has become to the world’s economy. A few facts that emerged amidst the tragedy and the tears tell the story. For instance, in Upshur County, where the Sago Mine explosion occurred, a coal miner can earn $55,000 a year. In the coal fields of West Virginia, as in the coal county I called home, those are pretty big bucks. The media reported median household income in Upshur as $26, 973. The median household income in Carbon County (PA) in 1999 was $35,113.

Coal prices, which ranged from $6 - $30 per ton (depending upon Btu potential and sulfur content) in December 2002, had soared to $17- $59 by the end of last year… the various grades almost doubling or even tripling in price during this three-year period. Tracking this trend, stock prices of the big, publicly-traded coal companies climbed about 75% during roughly the same time frame. Speculators, such as the International Coal Group which acquired the ill-fated Sago Mine only last year, are moving in like wolves on this profit potential.

And with more money to be made by miners and mine owners alike, safety seems to be suffering. The federal Mine Safety and Health Administration reportedly issued 185 safety citations at the Sago Mine in 2005… up from 117 the year before that. And so the “Back Story” comes full circle.

Of course, this “Back Story” isn’t only --- or even mainly --- about black diamonds. Coal’s course, as ever since the end of World War II, is being charted by oil. When I was growing up in Jim Thorpe, the seat of the County of Carbon, during the Fifties, the coal mines were closing. Why? Because people, even in my own hometown, were abandoning anthracite coal for the convenience and savings of cheap home-heating oil. Late last year, a National Geographic cover story summarized the reason for coal’s resurgence in a simple phrase: “The End of Cheap Oil.” Author Jeremy Leggett has taken the tale a step farther in his new book The Empty Tank, contending that oil production has peaked. Dwindling supplies and soaring prices are the new status quo, says Leggett, who operates a renewable-energy company. Leggett’s jeremiad envisions all the worst effects of global warming --- rising sea-levels, extreme weather conditions, famine --- that ever-increasing reliance on coal and synthetic coal products might entail.

We’ve heard it all before: in 1973 OPEC caused the first “energy crisis.” America drove right through it… briefly in compact cars, but soon in the SUVs that are today’s iteration of yesterday’s big-fin Caddies. Meanwhile, the tree-huggers have been crying “wolf” for so long, we may have stopped listening: Greenhouse gases? Ozone holes? Ho, hum… so what else is new?

On Sunday, after combing my neighborhood in an unsuccessful search for gasoline at less than $2.25 per gallon, I sat next to my natural-gas fireplace with the flame turned low as it’ll go, and re-read Aesop’s fable of the little shepherd boy who cried wolf. You know the story’s climax: “Later, he saw a real wolf prowling about his flock. Alarmed, he leaped to his feet and sang out as loudly as he could, ‘Wolf! Wolf!’ But the villagers thought he was trying to fool them again, and so they didn't come.”

I put down the book of “Fables” and cocked an ear. Was that a throaty ‘growl’ I just heard at the back door?