"Clean Coal"; No Democrat Should Be Spouting That Blatant Lie
The mantra of clean coal, as claimed by Governor Brian Schweitzer at the Democratic National Convention, is pie in the sky, a lie created by greedy energy companies that have snookered or "bribed" politicians in coal producing states which does a grave disservice to reality.
So much has been written about the fact that "clean coal" is a myth, a glorified lie, for example, here, here, and here, yet politicians prevaricate about the dangers of coal.
The energy companies, while spending big bucks on "clean coal" ads admit that they haven't invested any money in the technology.
Because the cost would be astronomical and the process would be essentially ineffective: "Clean coal can mean many things to many people. Until recently, the phrase was often used to describe various processes to reduce air and water pollution caused by mining and burning coal, such as installing scrubbers on smokestacks to reduce sulfur dioxide emissions that cause acid rain. But the industry's biggest problem is that coal is the country's largest source of greenhouse gas emissions. So now clean coal usually refers to carbon capture and sequestration, an attempt to capture a plant's carbon emissions and store them underground, permanently, rather than releasing them into the atmosphere to contribute to global climate change.
"The biggest challenges of carbon capture for the U.S. coal industry pertain to scale and cost, both of which are huge. Researchers at MIT estimate that if less than two-thirds of the carbon dioxide from U.S. coal plants were captured and compressed for storage, the collective volume to be stored underground "would about equal the total U.S. oil consumption of 20 million barrels per day."
"Building an infrastructure to accomplish this would not be cheap. The Department of Energy's National Energy Technology Laboratory found that adding carbon capture to existing coal plants would increase the cost of electricity generation by 81 percent. This includes neither the rising cost of coal, nor the heightened cost of new coal plant construction, which has surged by more than 130 percent since 2000.
"Assuming these challenges can be met, then what? Coal will still be dirty. The American Lung Association estimates that pollution from coal-fired power plants triggers 550,000 asthma attacks and 38,000 heart attacks annually, helping to cause an estimated 24,000 Americans to die prematurely each year. Coal combustion is also the country's largest source of mercury poisoning and releases more than five dozen different types of hazardous air pollutants.
Meanwhile, Jeff Biggers at Huffington Post has this to say about the issue: "This much is clear: The Obama administration has ushered in a new era of democratic participation in the great energy debate, opening the door to discussions on coal and its dirty legacy for the first time in nearly a decade, and allowing the winds of change to air out Washington's coal dank corridors. No question about it: The Obama administration has clearly made great strides in the right direction to tackle the reality of climate destabilization and unchecked coal mining operations.
"At the same time, it is also clear that the Obama administration does not have a road map for withdrawal from our disastrous dependence on coal, no grand plan for a regulated phase out of mountaintop removal or coal-fired plants. Instead, borrowing a page from the compromising policies of the Carter and Clinton wags, the Obama administration appears to be putting its faith in questionable regulations, albeit stricter, but still beholden to the coal industry and its inevitable crimes of extraction and indisputable impact on our children's future.
"In an interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, President Obama borrowed one of his favorite campaign lines and reminded us that his misplaced Illinois coalfield nostalgia is still deeply embedded:
" 'I think that it is possible for us to create a set of clean energy mechanisms that allow us to use things not just like oil sands, but also coal," he said. 'The United States is the Saudi Arabia of coal, but we have our own homegrown problems in terms of dealing with a cheap energy source that creates a big carbon footprint.'
"NASA climatologist James Hansen spelled out his scientific conclusions in no uncertain terms:
" 'Coal is not only the largest fossil fuel reservoir of carbon dioxide, it is the dirtiest fuel. Coal is polluting the world's oceans and streams with mercury, arsenic and other dangerous chemicals. The dirtiest trick that governments play on their citizens is the pretense that they are working on "clean coal" or that they will build power plants that are "capture ready" in case technology is ever developed to capture all pollutants. The trains carrying coal to power plants are death trains. Coal-fired power plants are factories of death.'
"In the face of a 6,000 acre mountaintop removal strip mine, an extraordinary community of coalfield residents and coal mining families in the Coal River Mountain area of West Virginia have drawn up a proposal for an industrial wind farm that has permanently changed the coal-equals-jobs stranglehold. The proposed Coal River Mountain wind farm, consisting of 164 wind turbines and generating 328 megawatts of electricity, would create 200 jobs, provide over $1.74 million in annual property taxes to Raleigh County; and coal severance taxes related to proposed mountaintop removal mining, by comparison, would provide the county with only $36,000 per year. That's 200 jobs for life versus a similar amount of stripping jobs for only 14 years or so of coal."
Given just the above, how can any elected Democrat with integrity continue to promote the "clean coal" lie?
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