All eyes are on big oil these days, and for good reason, with possibly the worst oil spill in history happening as we watch. But coal, the other fossil fuel, is by far a worse culprit in the long run. From mining to processing to transportation to burning to disposal, coal has more environmental impacts than any other energy source. And we’re burning it everywhere in the U.S. — often without pollution-control equipment — even on our college campuses.

Here in Wisconsin, a large percentage of our electricity has been produced with coal. That’s why I’ve been excited to see the University here in Madison shifting from coal to natural gas and biomass. After a successful lawsuit by the Sierra Club in 2007-2008, Governor Jim Doyle decided to convert the university’s power plant rather than simply installing scrubbers to reduce air pollution emissions. This was a part of Doyle’s Clean Energy Jobs Act (which unfortunately was not passed during this session of the legislature), aimed at producing 25 percent of the state’s energy from renewable sources by 2025.

Once the governor’s decision was made, UW scientists from the Wisconsin Bioenergy Initiative and the College of Engineering jumped in head first, enthusiastic to create a model power plant for others to imitate. By investing $250 million to produce a cleaner and safer environment, the UW will become the first major research university in the country to completely eliminatethe use of coal for energy. Unfortunately, other UW administrators seem to be dragging their feet. According to the Sierra Club, coal-fired plants at campuses in Eau Claire, La Crosse, Stevens Point, and Stout are currently violating the Clean Air Act.

Here in the U.S. we need to move away from coal-fired energy production. Coal produces almost 40% of our electricity, burning 1.6 plus billion tons a year and generating over 30% of the country’s greenhouse gases. If that was the only pollution coal caused, it would be reason enough to change over to renewable energy sources.

But coal is an extremely dirty fuel source. In fact, the Union of Concerned Scientists says

Coal is cheap, plentiful and dirty — as cheap as dirt, as plentiful as dirt, and as dirty as dirt — since after all, coal is little more than dirt that burns.

Coal pollutes the air and the water with soot (particulate pollution), smog, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide (which when washed out of the atmosphere produce acid rain), lead, arsenic, and mercury, as well as generating a staggering amount of toxic waste — 120 million solid tons a year, enough to fill a million railcars and create a train that’s 9,600 miles long!

To my mind, coal’s pollution of our lakes and streams may be the most insidious of all its harmful effects. Coal pollutes our water sources at every step along its dirty path. At the front end of this process, moutaintop removal (MTR) coal mining — mining that is destroying large swaths of Kentucky and West Virginia today — dumps millions of tons of waste rock into valleys and streams below the MTR site, polluting the water in the area. And once mining has ended and mines have been abandoned, drainage also occurs when the sites fill with water and leak toxic chemicals like lead, mercury, and arsenic into surrounding water supplies.

Before it’s burned, coal is “washed” to separate impurities from the mined minerals. The slurry left over from this process — a thick, sludge-like mixture of water, coal waste particles, rock, and clay — is stored in large impoundments of up to a billion gallons. These retention ponds leak into local water supplies and occasionally burst, sending plumes of toxic pollution into the surrounding countryside.

When burned, coal emits sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide, which results in acid rain. With passage of revisions to the the Clean Air Act in 1977, all new coal-burning power plants were required to install “scrubbers” to rid themselves of this type of pollution. But the vast majority of coal-fired power plants still have no pollution-control equipment, because older generating plants were grandfathered in. That means that acid rain is still causing lakes to go sterile and trees to die. In fact, about 20% of all once pristine lakes in the Adirondacks of New York State are without fish and other life.

Burning coal also causes mercury to pollute our lakes and streams. Mercury accumulates in the fish in our waterways, building up in the bodies of those who eat them. Once there, mercury causes brain damage, mental retardation, and other developmental problems in developing fetuses and small infants. Unfortunately, this problem is so widespread in the U.S. that over one in six women of childbearing age has such high mercury levels in her blood that any child she carries is at risk.

Since mercury damages the brain, it seems ironic that the four colleges in the University of Wisconsin System — institutions meant for higher learning — still burn coal right on their own campuses. What administrators at the UW System campuses don’t seem to realize is that good environmental policy turns out to be good economic policy in 100% of the cases. Environmental damage is deficit spending — we’ll pay for it in the future. But investing in a healthy environment amounts to an investment in our infrastructure. And when we invest in and support our biosphere (and, as a result, in our future as a species), we are also investing in future economic gains.

One real test of the economic outcomes of green energy investment came in the wake of the Kyoto treaty on climate change. Forty-four nations signed the accord, but only Denmark, Sweden, Germany, and Great Britain will meet the mandated reductions of greenhouse gases. Of those 44 countries, these four nations had strong economic growth during that period.

What we need now are forward-thinking decision-makers. The Wisconsin idea — a philosophy that holds that the boundaries of the university should be the boundaries of the state and that research conducted in the University of Wisconsin System should solve the problems and improve the health, quality of life, and the environment for all citizens of the state — should move us in that direction. The UW in Madison has jumped onboard. Now it’s time for the rest of the System to follow its lead.