CNN updates the coal story of the year:

Estimates for the amount of thick sludge that gushed from a Tennessee coal plant last week have tripled to more than a billion gallons, as cleanup crews try to remove the goop from homes and railroads and halt its oozing into an adjacent river.

That would be “enough to fill 1,660 Olympic-size swimming pools” assuming you wanted to fill your pool with “concentrated levels of mercury and arsenic.” And that is, as Richard Graves puts it, “more than 100 times larger than the Exxon Valdez disaster and, in fact, more than every drop of petroleum used in the United States that day.”

The next time someone says “clean coal,” be sure to do that bit where you cough and say “B.S.” Or maybe skip the couging part.

Related Posts:

• The day ‘clean coal’ died
• Clean coal, meet harsh reality
• Clean coal: Claptrap or crap trap?
• Is coal with carbon capture and storage a core climate solution?

Time is running out:

Climate change is happening more rapidly than anyone thought possible, the German government’s expert, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, warned in an interview.

The threats posed by climate change are worse than those imagined by most governments, warned Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, the scientist who heads the Potsdam Institute for Research on Global Warming Effects and acts as an adviser to German Chancellor Angela Merkel on climate-change issues.

Schellnhuber warns that previous predictions about climate change and its catastrophic effects were too cautious and optimistic.

“In nearly all areas, the developments are occurring more quickly than it has been assumed up until now,” Schellnhuber told the Saarbruecker Zeitung newspaper in an interview published Monday, Dec. 29. “We are on our way to a destabilization of the world climate that has advanced much further than most people or their governments realize.”

This isn’t news to top climate scientists around the world (see Hadley Center: “Catastrophic” 5-7°C warming by 2100 on current emissions path) or even to top climate scientists in this country (see US Geological Survey stunner: Sea-level rise in 2100 will likely “substantially exceed” IPCC projections, SW faces “permanent drying”) and certainly not to people who follow the scientific literature, like Climate Progress readers (see Study: Water-vapor feedback is “strong and positive,” so we face “warming of several degrees Celsius”).

But it’s always worth reporting when another leading scientist goes public with the truth that has been too long the bastion of “off the record” remarks:

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“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way–in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”

Right now, it’s mostly the worst of times for the environment — and hence the health and well-being of current and future generations. David Sassoon of the must-read climate blog SolveClimate has a Dickensian tale I’m reprinting it its entirety below — and what could be more Dickensian than coal and tar!

Coal ash deposits in the USA are now under renewed scrutiny after a giant spill just before Christmas released 5.4 million cubic yards of toxic sludge into Tennessee waterways. Water tests near the spill from the Kingston Fossil Plant showed elevated levels of lead and thallium, which can cause birth defects and nervous and reproductive system disorders. The spill muddied the waters in the Emory river and is flowing into tributaries of the Tennessee River – the water supply for Chattanooga and millions of people living downstream in Alabama, Tennessee and Kentucky.

So now a big question mark hangs over the hundreds of coal plants all across the country which store their fly ash in unlined embankments and ponds — like the one that failed last week. Most are situated near rivers that supply water needed by the coal plants to operate.

The NY Times reported that in the US, coal plants produce 129 million tons of postcombustion byproducts a year. It’s the second-largest waste stream in the country, after municipal solid waste, and it’s storage and handling is unregulated. Who knew?

It is yet another measure of the high price of addiction to fossil fuels, which is not only polluting the air and warming the earth, but fouling the nation’s terrestrial and aquatic environment as well. The Tennessee coal spill is a wake up call not only for the coal industry, but the oil industry as well, and not only for America but for Canada, too.

Both nations, still in pursuit of endless supplies of fossil energy, are collaborating on the exploitation of Alberta’s tar sands whose byproduct will be spills like the one in Tennessee, only on steroids.

In Alberta, visible from outer space, are 23 squares miles of unstable, unregulated and leaking man-made “tailings ponds” holding the toxic leavings of the mining process. A dam breach is only a matter of time.

Required reading on this subject is Andrew Nikiforuk’s new book Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent, recently published to wide acclaim in Canada and set for US release in March. In this context, one chapter in particular called “The Ponds” is of direct and chilling relevance:

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