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Saturday, April 30, 2005
Ellorin: Coal, the most expensive fuel
By BenCyrus G. Ellorin
Fastlanes
HONG KONG--There is a very big lie being peddled right there in our doorsteps as the groups behind the 200-MW Mindanao coal-fired power plant in Villanueva, Misamis Oriental justify the said project.
The most commonly used justification of the coal peddlers like the German Steag and their counterpart State Power Inc. is that compared to other fuels, coal is the least expensive.
At face value, coal may look less expensive compared to oil or other energy sources. A closer look though will expose this as a wicked baloney.
Truth is that if we factor in the External Cost of burning coal, we would be surprised to see how much society is paying so that coal power plant companies can earn billions of dollars.
Greenpeace had done an exercise computing the external cost of burning coal by one of the biggest power companies in Hong Kong, the China Light and Power (CLP).
In that exercise, Greenpeace used the European Commission formula in calculating the external cost in electricity generation.
External cost comes in when the social or economic activities of one group of persons have an impact on another group and when that impact is not fully accounted or compensated for by the first group.
According to the EC standard, there are at least 7 categories in assessing external cost in generating electricity.
On top of the list is global warming; the others are ecosystem, human mortality, human morbidity, crops/agriculture, amenity losses and building materials.
The Greenpeace exercise came to a conclusion that the China Light and Power's external coast is HK$30-billion yearly. They computed that for every dollar of profit by the said company, the public spends HK$3 to clean up the mess or repair the damage on the environment.
This is really appalling because society, majority of whom are poor, are made to pay for the damage to the environment by corporations, as they spend more for health care and suffer reduced productivity.
If we make the same exercise and compute the external cost of the widely unpopular Mindanao coal-fired power plant project, am pretty sure that the public will be astounded by its high external cost that we Mindanaoans will have to pay. And I am absolutely certain that this project will have high external cost.
This is a very bad thing about bad foreign investments that ought to be considered not just by the government but by the business sector as well.
This no doubt impacts negatively the poverty reduction targets and environmental rehabilitation initiatives that are underway.
Very recently, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) announced that "perhaps the Philippines will meet its Millenium Development Goals (MDG)."
The MDG seeks to halve poverty levels by 2015. The UNDP must have based its rosy assessment of the Philippines on government figures that indicate that that by 2015, the income of the country's poor shall have increased by more than US$1/day.
Perhaps we will meet the targets, perhaps we will not. My argument is that the environment is a very important factor in any poverty reduction strategy, it being the ecological and economic base of production by majority of the people, the farmers and the fisherfolk.
The destruction of our environment no doubt contributes immensely to productivity reduction. This may not be reflected yet in official figures but if take a closer look at our economy, the Gross National Product may have increased by five or six percent, but less and less jobs has been created and the poverty incidence still increasing.
And the policy of putting up more environment destructive projects like the coal plant is no doubt contributing further to poverty as the public pays for the external cost, directly through loss in agriculture or fisheries productivity for example or indirectly through increased health care expenses due to pollution.
Knowing all these and more, it simply is revolting!
(The writer is a freelance journalist who works as an environmental campaigner. He works as a community organizer and does volunteer work as campaigns coordinator of the environmental group Task Force Macajalar based in Cagayan de Oro. You can send your comments on his column through bency.ellorin@gmail.com)
(April 30, 2005 issue)
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