How large do numbers have to be before they mean something to us?           

Meet 1,232,659.

He’s the amount of pollution released in just one Kansas county in 2006, according to the latest EPA report. Because of him, this county ranks in the worst 20 percent of the dirtiest counties in the United States.

That county is Douglas, once thought to be the environmentally friendly, progressive speck of blue in a sea of Kansas red. But no matter the political color, the county is dirtier, mostly because of emissions released by the coal-fired power plant just north of Lawrence.

So far Lawrence has ignored 1,232,659. He’s public information that’s long been crippled by poor accessibility and outdated EPA reports.

That’s where Scorecard.org comes to the rescue. This Web site, created by the Environmental Defense Fund, a nonpartisan environmental advocacy group, compiles pollution data from various EPA reports and distills it down into easier, bite-size nuggets of numbers. Scorecard breaks down the pollution data into how it’s released: to the land, air and water. In each of those sections, the site gives the chemical names and amounts released by each reporting facility.

Contained in Douglas County’s pollutants are lead and mercury, known causes of cancer and severe brain damage. According to the EPA reports, 97.8 percent of the lead released and 100 percent of mercury released in Douglas County comes from the coal power plant, called the Lawrence Energy Center. These two pollutants, in addition to a list of about 15 slightly less harmful but still dangerous chemicals, harm the Lawrence community because they are released into public spaces including the river where Lawrence get its drinking water.

‘Dilution is the solution to pollution’

The Lawrence Energy Center sits on the Kaw River, is the unfortunate recipient of much the mercury emitted from the coal plant. Mercury released to the air or water accumulates in larger fish because they feed on smaller fish. Coal plants are usually located on rivers because they require water to create steam and to cool the plant. This water taken from the river is either evaporated or returned to the river after it has been filtered through cooling ponds outside the plant.

Friends of the Kaw, a clean river advocacy group, created an advisory brochure about the safety of fish from the Kaw River.

Even though signs have been posted not to eat fish from the river, “I don’t think fewer people have come out to fish,” Laura Calwell, president of Friends of the Kaw from 1999 to 2002, said. “We don’t want to discourage people from fishing. It’s a balancing act between informing people and scaring them.”

Calwell took a survey of fishermen and found that pollutants in the river harm a disproportionally large number of minorities because more minorities eat the fish they caught in the river. She said almost 50 percent of the state’s minorities live in the Kaw River corridor.

“Fishing is important to them culturally, and the fish they catch are supplemental food for their families,” Calwell said.

Cindy Annett, scientific advisor to Friends of the Kaw, said mercury contamination is not unique to Lawrence, but it’s common in the United States, where almost half of the electricity is generated from coal.

“The way heavy metals are handled in the environment is a real problem,” Annett said. “There’s an old saying that ‘dilution is the solution to pollution.’ For so many years, the river was treated like a sewer.”

The river has become cleaner, Calwell said, but how much cleaner varies by the type of pollution. She said the Kansas Department of Health and Environment’s most recent permit for the Lawrence Energy Center is much stricter than old permits, and the plant is headed in the right direction.

“We are going to hold their feet to the fire — we aren’t there to be their friends,” Calwell said. “We want to make sure they are doing right for the people who live here. If they know somebody’s watching, it helps them do their job. If they don’t do their job, we are going to let them know about it.”

Blowing more than hot air

The billowing smokestacks are the signature of any coal-fired power plant, but in the white, wafting clouds of water vapor are the invisible pollutants that do the most harm, including nitrogen oxides and sulfur dioxide, components of acid rain and smog, and particulate matter, notorious for causing asthma and lung cancer and claiming the lives of up to 52,000 Americans every year.

Since Westar’s installation of pollution controls on the Lawrence Energy Center in the mid-1980s, levels of air pollution have steadily decreased from 1999 to 2006. The Lawrence Energy Center has three separate units, and each has varying levels of pollution controls, said Bill Eastman, director of environmental services for Westar.

He said all units have particulate removal devices, two units have wet scrubbers to remove sulfur dioxide and the largest unit has low nitrous oxide (NOx) burners.

These pollution controls are now more than 20 years old, but regulated air pollution from the coal plant has decreased across the board: 14 percent for NOx, 55 percent for particulate emissions and almost 27 percent for sulfur dioxide, according to state and EPA reports.

But the biggest pollution concern, carbon dioxide, doesn’t have an air pollution number for you to meet — it doesn’t have to be regulated even though it is the main culprit of global warming.

That may soon change because of the Supreme Court’s 2007 ruling in Massachusetts v. EPA, when the court concluded that carbon dioxide was a pollutant and must be regulated.

That decision had direct implications in Kansas when Rod Bremby, Secretary of the Kansas Department of Health and Environment, rejected air permits for a proposed coal-fired power plant that was going to be built in Holcomb. Bremby cited pollution from carbon dioxide as the reason for denying the permits.

Bremby said no rules or regulations about carbon dioxide have been created yet, but the state must follow rules based on the Clean Air Act.

“The options in front of us were to approve the permit and ignore that CO2 was a pollutant, modify the permit or deny the permit,” he said. “We had to decide how much was too much. The plant would have emitted 11 million tons of carbon dioxide per year. We had a responsibility to make this decision as the state’s largest regulating body.”

Bremby said he had faced some political backlash in the wake of his decision.

“The decision wasn’t politically palatable in all areas, but that’s not what we are about,” he said.

So who is the enemy?

1,925,836 tons of coal burned at the Lawrence Energy Center in 2006. 918,343 pounds of pollution. 18,172 train cars of coal shipped to the plant from the Powder River Basin in Wyoming.

We’ve met the numbers, but how do we relate to them? Lawrence can blame the coal numbers for its pollution woes, but the growing demand for more electricity in Lawrence goes hand in hand with the amount of pollution released back to the community.

What is the solution to coal?

“Excessive electricity consumption is our problem,” Bremby said. He compares the obesity problem to the overconsumption of electricity. “It’s a lot like our health problems in the United States. We know that most of the health care dollar spent is because of chronic illness and disease. Look at those conditions and you’ll see that it’s because of overconsumption and a lack of activity. Maybe we are consuming too much.”

Westar has developed a new energy efficiency department that works with schools, businesses and agencies to come up with better ways to use energy, Eastman of Westar said.

“There’s a big educational component to it,” he said. “We can change a whole generation of kids and how they use electricity.”

Although energy efficiency and using less electricity won’t save Lawrence from using coal, it could greatly reduce the amount of coal needed. And less coal burned means less carbon dioxide released to the air.

“Energy efficiency is our least costly resource,” said Nancy Jackson, executive director of the Climate and Energy Project at the Land Institute. “The only thing that will cost something are the programs.”

Both Bremby and Eastman said Westar has pursued pollution reduction and energy efficiency programs voluntarily.

“Kansas has a good history of being able to work through and solve problems together voluntarily, not through heavy-handed regulation,” Bremby said. “We look for compliance more than we look to punish.”

From (coal) ashes to immortality

The original Lawrence settlers probably didn’t have coal power in mind when they developed this motto for the city in the 1800s. But the phrase may be a harbinger for the future of energy in Kansas as more thought is put into transitioning away from polluting and non-renewable energy.

Coal has survived so far because of general consumer apathy about where electricity comes from, said Scott Allegrucci, director of the Great Plains Alliance for Clean Energy. “People want to turn on the light switch as many times as they want without thinking about it. We can’t continue to do that and have energy policy that makes sense.”

But after the Holcomb coal plant debate, increasing electricity rates and increased knowledge about global warming, more Kansans than ever before are meeting the numbers and putting them in context.

“Personal action has never been more important than it is today,” Jackson said. “Our real power lies in our ability to come together and make strong statements to our political officials.”

Because 75 percent of Kansas’ electricity comes from coal, the state will have a hard time getting rid of coal in the short term, but that shouldn’t hamper efforts to add alternative forms of energy to its catalog of choices.

“We have a menu of options,” Allegrucci said. “Let’s open it up again instead of accepting what a small group of people wants.”

The Lawrence Energy Center means coal is here and won’t be going away for a while, but Lawrencians can still start the transition to cleaner energy.

John Wilson, a Democrat running against State Representative Tom Sloan in Lawrence’s 45^rd district, said people could look at buying green tags to reduce pollution. For about $20 a month, purchasing green tags offsets negative environmental effects of polluting plants by investing in wind farms and renewable research. This supports local renewable energy, like the Bowersock hydroelectric dam near Sixth and New Hampshire, among other renewable energies.

“We’ve already dealt the cards in having coal here,” Wilson said. “But we have to have incentives from the government and actions from the citizens.”

As the cost of coal, both environmentally and economically, increases, now more than ever, it makes sense for Kansas to start the transition to renewable energy.

“It’s not that most people are anti-coal, it’s that they are pro-renewables,” Wilson said. “About 60 percent of people support renewables, even if there is a slight increase in utility costs. We’ve had it fairly easy. Kansas has had cheap energy for quite some time, now is the time to be innovative.”

Kansas’ neighbors have already started moving to wind power. Kansas, even though ranked third in the nation for wind potential, is currently harvesting a fraction of one percent of its potential energy. Although some don’t think moving to renewable energy is possible, Kansas’ Midwest neighbors like Texas are proving them wrong.

“This isn’t going into the dark unknown,” Wilson said. “It’s more like we can just look off of someone else’s test. They already have the papers, but we can do it in Kansas and be on the map.”