Looking Back at the Black Seam

Does any other young baby boomers or Gen Xers remember Sting's album from the 1980s, Dream of the Blue Turtles? At the time, in my mid-20s, I particularly liked the song Russians (which was about nuclear war and was known for the line, "I hope the Russians love their children too").

I generally knew the other songs, too, but hadn't heard any of them for decades until I happened across this one about mining yesterday. It and its plaintive oboe (listen to it here) have been stuck in my head since then:

We Work The Black Seam

This place has changed for good
Your economic theory said it would
It's hard for us to understand
We can't give up our jobs the way we should
Our blood has stained the coal
We tunneled deep inside the nation's soul
We matter more than pounds and pence
Your economic theory makes no sense

One day in a nuclear age
They may understand our rage
They build machines that they can't control
And bury the waste in a great big hole
Power was to become cheap and clean
Grimy faces were never seen
Deadly for twelve thousand years is carbon fourteen
We work the black seam together
We work the black seam together

The seam lies underground
Three million years of pressure packed it down
We walk through ancient forest lands
And light a thousand cities with our hands
Your dark satanic mills
Have made redundant all our mining skills
You can't exchange a six inch band
For all the poisoned streams in Cumberland
Your economic theory makes no sense

One day in a nuclear age
They may understand our rage
They build machines that they can't control
And bury the waste in a great big hole
Power was to become cheap and clean
Grimy faces were never seen
Deadly for twelve thousand years is carbon fourteen
We work the black seam together
We work the black seam together

Should the children weep
The turning world will sing their souls to sleep
When you have sunk without a trace
The universe will suck me into place

One day in a nuclear age
They may understand our rage
They build machines that they can't control
And bury the waste in a great big hole
Power was to become cheap and clean
Grimy faces were never seen
But deadly for twelve thousand years is carbon fourteen
We work the black seam together
We work the black seam together

This was written (I assume) just after Chernobyl, so the warning that "deadly for twelve thousand years is carbon fourteen" makes sense. And the point of view of miners whose work goes away is real, as we are constantly reminded here in the U.S.

The thing the lyrics are missing, of course, is that coal isn't just literally dirty. It's that the carbon dioxide emitted when coal is burned lasts in the atmosphere a long time, and warms the planet. Not 14,000 years, of course, but "About 75% of CO2 emissions have an average perturbation lifetime of 1,800 years and 25% have lifetimes much longer than 5,000 years." And some of the carbon will still be around for 100,000 years. (source)

That's why climate writer and meteorologist Eric Holthaus recently wrote It's time to go nuclear in the fight against climate change. The carbon dioxide from fossil fuels — including supposedly "clean" natural gas —has to go as quickly as possible, if we are to have any decent chance of maintaining the habitat needed for human civilization (not humans necessarily, but civilization).

I'm not sure I agree that nuclear is essential to that change, since I'm more in the power-down camp than figure-out-how-to-keep-going-as-is camp, but it's worth a read.