Coal-generated electricity remains local health and environmental crisis

I want to draw your attention to Naperville’s addiction to coal, and the need to report on it in order to bring about change.

The Illinois Municipal Electric Agency (IMEA) is of mounting concern in the community, and it seems clear that it is not getting the coverage it needs from the media or our politicians.

This was validated at Saturday’s Naperville Environmental Town Hall hosted by Rep. Grant Wehrli and Sen. Laura Ellman. There was very little time for questions, and the issue of IMEA’s contractual ties to coal was not addressed. Despite robust community engagement, these events tend to be “greenwashing” events to placate the public.

The specific concerns are:

91% of Naperville’s electricity comes from coal through our contract with IMEA.

Coal is a potent contributor to climate change, which is accelerating in its environmental impact.

Coal is a significant source of air pollution that contributes to respiratory, cardiovascular, and metabolic disease.

Coal combustion leads to the release of toxic metals into the environment.

In fact, the two main coal plants that supply IMEA with electricity were found to release four times higher the amount of arsenic than is safe and two times higher levels of lead. Both of these are neurotoxins, and arsenic is a carcinogen.

While the coal-generated electricity is used in affluent suburbs like Naperville, these toxic metals are released in poorer communities down south, making this an issue of environmental injustice.

Moreover, this creates an out-of-sight outof-mind mentality when it comes to identifying where our electricity comes from.

IMEA is contractually obligated to get its electricity from these toxic coal plants for decades to come. In addition, these IMEA contracts place a very low cap on rooftop solar, handicapping citizens’ efforts to take action.

This is not at all sustainable from the standpoints of climate change or human health.

We desperately need journalists to hold our politicians’ feet to the fire on this issue.

More important, we need the public to become aware of how their governmental entities are failing to address what is, in fact, an existential crisis. Robert M. Sargis, M.D., Ph.D., University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago Center for Health and Environment, Naperville Environment and Sustainability Task Force