Coal-laboration, wanting more

Massive machinery at work in the open-pit Wyodak coal mine in the coal-rich Powder River Basin outside Gillette, Wyoming. Original image from Carol M. Highsmith’s America, Library of Congress collection. Digitally enhanced by rawpixel. by Carol M Highsmith is licensed under CC-CC0 1.0

I once worked for a company that has a Coal Operating Contract with the Department of Energy from 2004 to 2006. I was young, naive and approached it with rose-colored glasses. That seems like ages ago. I was writing the environmental impact statement in compliance with existing environmental regulations at that time which included a requirement for a Health Risk Impact Assessment.

It took a good ten years after that experience before I found out that the basis for HRIAs are epidemiological studies. The Philippine Energy Mix still is predominantly coal-based and I have no idea what is the rate of the transition away from this source of energy. My current colleagues are working on the Clean Energy Scenario (CES) of the energy mix and the Long-Term Strategy (LTS) for fighting climate change but intuitively, I feel that the future still seems bleak for specific contexts. Climate action is truly complicated and hard. It is not always true that clean is always healthy. Phasing out coal and replacing it with renewables still does not have enough extensive evidence to demonstrate improved health outcomes.

So how I do I figure out solutions? Again, the little things…but I feel tired, I am just not that young anymore to be able to traverse mountains and cross seas. However, I’m tempted…or challenged…to further enhance my knowledge on epidemiology and support empirical evidence on the health impacts of what the Germans call ENERGIEWENDE. I once pitched in the idea of the health and safety impacts of the transition from offshore oil and gas to offshore wind to the folks at GWO in Copenhagen but its more than two (2) years and I have not gotten back to them.

I was once in this crossroad from 2014-2016 on my last days at Bureau Veritas…there is this itch to learn more. I spent the weekend with a renowned statistician and we had a lengthy discussion on using your intuition in defining models. Yes, I needed those words of wisdom to start the week right. At this point in my life, I knew I have been here before and this is about something bigger and better.