Almost sixty years ago weather conditions over London blanketed the city with a damp toxic fog of coal dust. The gray air was thick with choking carbon particles. Visibility was dropped to one foot in the Stygian gloom. Thousands fatally succumbed to respiratory ailments with hundreds of thousands suffering severe breathing difficulties throughout that December.
According to Wikipedia the roads were littered with abandoned cars. Midday concerts were cancelled due to total darkness. Archivists at the British Museum found smog lurking in the book stacks. Cattle in the city’s Smithfield market were killed and thrown away before they could be slaughtered and sold — their lungs were black.
On the second day of the smog, Saturday, Dec. 6, 500 people died in London. When the ambulances stopped running, thousands of gasping Londoners walked through the smog to the city’s hospitals.
The lips of the dying were blue. Heavy smoking and chronic exposure to pollution had already weakened the lungs of those who fell ill during the smog. Particulates and acids in the killer brew finished the job by triggering massive inflammations. In essence, the dead had suffocated.
Some 900 more people died on Tuesday, Dec. 9, 1952. Then the wind swept in unexpectedly. The killer fog vanished as quickly as it had arrived.
This disaster forced the British government and the energy companies to seek out cleaner alternatives to deadly coal, but the GOP political machine have attacked the Clean Air Act and EPA for restricting coal mining in America and the chairman of the Ohio Coal Association has claimed that coal production has dropped from 1.2 trillion tons per annum to about 816 million tons in black coal country, but a good percentage of that drop-off has come from the lack of economic activity during the Second Depression.
Mitt Romney’s running mate Paul Ryan doesn’t see it that way and has said, “The one thing you can do is elect a man named Mitt Romney who will end this war on coal and allow us to keep these good paying jobs.”
As an easterner who has had to breathe coal dust most of his life, all I can say is “Fuck you and fuck Big Coal.”
I am a simple man.
Coal is dirty. It will never be clean. The coal companies want to rip off the top of mountains and poison the air we breathe.
In 1948 hundreds of people died in Donora, PA during a cold weather inversion, but the various industries in the valley refused to shut down operations, calling the conditions an ‘act of God’.
They never named which one and neither has Mitt Romney with his calls for more coal.
“Burn, baby, burn.”
It is good for capitalism.