White Christmas, Coal Black Snow

Last Friday I was standing in line at my local grocery store when I heard these famous song lyrics: “I’m dreaming of a White…Christmas…Just like the one I used to know.”

I cringed. 

For many, there is nothing that evokes the spirit of Christmas more than a blanket of white snow. It’s comforting and clean – the image of a pristine, welcoming environment. For me, snow was not always white. Growing up in Czechoslovakia during the 1970s, at a time when coal was extracted and burned in my town, the snow was often discolored. It was, in fact, often black.

The story of coal and communism in what was then Czechoslovakia is the same story: they rose and fell together. Following the communist takeover in 1948, with Czechoslovakia a strategic base for the Eastern European COMECON countries, the emphasis of the Czech economy was on production and high energy consumption. Demand for brown coal alone increased five times over 1937 levels.  Coal mines and coal burning power plants were often in the middle of towns. They were filthy, terribly inefficient operations – spewing black smoke with absolutely no regard for the environment.

This was the case in my town. At the base of a valley, coal production was all around us. On winter days of a cold inversion, the black coal ash clung to the valley floor. The air was thick with ash and the snow was covered in a layer of black. On these days, I remember feeling it in my lungs and the site of white footprints through a field of black.

I also remember how, on these days, the Czech government piled the young schoolchildren onto buses and drove them to above the smog line. We would stand there and look down on our small town. The trees were black. The snow was black. The air was thick. Our parents – my parents – were left down there. My older brother was somewhere down there.

I can’t say that at that moment I became an environmentalist; I was too young. But I can say that at that moment I was deeply concerned. I can also say that in my work with NRDC, I often think of these moments.

People talk about how advancing clean energy solutions is about future generations. While I certainly think that’s true, I also think it is about our past. I’ve spoken to many who want to correct what they saw and knew, instantly, was wrong.

Opponents also talk about how clean energy is too expensive – too impossible. That’s simply not true. Emissions of sulphur dioxide and particulate matter have decreased significantly in the Czech Republic, as the country has shifted its energy production to meet EU energy standards. From 1994 to 2009 consumption of brown coal dropped from 7.35 to 2.44 millions of tonnes. SO2 is similarly down from 1,800 thousands of tonnes in 1990 to 200 thousand tonnes in 2000. This is not clean energy, per se, but cleaner energy. If the Czech Republic could muster the capital and political will to improve its energy sector on the heels of its Velvet Revolution, surely the United States can move to a cleaner economy. In 1963, with the passage of the Clean Air Act, the US took a critical step. Every extension has been critical. But these extensions are best understood as steps, not the final step. There is more to do yet.

At NRDC, I try to deploy capital to implement environmental solutions at scale. The distance from my office in Chelsea to the Czech Republic is thousands of miles. But it is also much shorter than that; I hear about a White Christmas and I can be standing in black snow in a second.

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