Clean Coal
Posted on February 24, 2010 | By Denny Tyler | 1 Comment
‘Clean’ Coal? Don’t Try to Shovel That.
Clean coal: Never was there an oxymoron more insidious, or more dangerous to our public health. Invoked as often by the Democratic presidential candidates as by the Republicans and by liberals and conservatives alike, this slogan has blindsided any meaningful progress toward a sustainable energy policy.
“Clean” is not a word that normally leaps to mind for a commodity some spoilsports associate with unsafe mines, mountaintop removal, acid rain, black lung, lung cancer, asthma, mercury contamination, and, of course, global warming. And yet the phrase “clean coal” now routinely turns up in political discourse, almost as if it were a reality.
Obama Pushing Clean Coal, Green Jobs
In his meeting with the governors, Obama also announced a new task force to study ways to increase the use of coal in meeting the nation’s energy needs without increasing the pollution that contributes to global warming.
“It’s been said that the United States is the Saudi Arabia of coal, and that’s because … it’s one of our most abundant energy resources,” Obama said. “If we can develop the technology to capture the carbon pollution released by coal, it can create jobs and provide energy well into the future.”
Exposing the Myth of Clean Coal Power
In reality, we can’t really talk about clean coal — it doesn’t exist. Though the coal industry is right to point out that it has improved filters on coal plants, sending less traditional pollutants like sulfur dioxide and mercury into the air, the toxic waste that remains behind is only growing. The biggest advantage of coal power has been cost — in most cases, it remains much cheaper than cleaner alternatives like wind, solar or natural gas. But the cheapness of coal depends on the fact that external costs — climate change, or the health impacts of air and water pollution from coal — remain external, paid for not by utilities or coal companies but society as a whole.
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In my opinion an argument for clean coal simply cannot be made without considering the entire process. I continually hear about cleaning up coal plants by CCS, burying the carbon dioxide, and all of the sudden coal is clean? What about blowing up the mountains to get the coal in the first process? Or the huge sludge impoundments or injections from the second process?
I don’t give a damn what they say… you cannot clear-cut a mountain of all the trees and vegetation, blow the top off that mountain dumping the debris/over-burden into nearby valleys and streams, take the product from that endeavor, run it through a processing plant to clean it pumping everything that was causing the product to be considered dirty back into what is left of the mountains via massive ponds or abandoned underground mine works without including all of this, and some, into an honest conversation about the cleanliness of coal. I have to wonder, does the end justify the means when we talk about clean coal?
Coal will never be clean as long as we have mountaintop removal, coal sludge ponds and injections, and coal ash ponds unaccounted for in the process.
I think in the long run folks are going to come to realize by personal experience or knowledge that coal is as clean as it is ever going to get when it is left undisturbed in the ground.
Our remnants of wilderness will yield bigger values to the nation’s character and health than they will to its pocketbook, and to destroy them will be to admit that the latter are the only values that interest us. – Aldo Leopold
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April 10th, 2010 @ 11:22 pm
Thank you Denny Tyler for all your great work here! It is so refreshing to see there are people like you that have eyes wide open to what our nations true “energy crisis” is. After personally fighting so hard to get Obama in office (he has such verbal promise! I am afraid he is beginning to sound like an eloquent talking head. His energy plan as a whole is a human disaster if it goes through. WE need lots of people fighting against it. Look at all the sick children around any coal mine in the nation….asthma, cancer, respiratotry problems. children are our nations most valuable asset, and innocent in all this mess. And nuclear power plants? As unintelligent if not worse than such idea as “clean coal” which I agree does not exists. Chernobyl Russia was an electricity generating nuclear power plant, the explosiion killed 300K people, the radiation still effecting people today 20 years later, google “birth defects” from that disaster, its heartbreaking. It effected the halth of people across the U.S.! There is no such thing as clean or safe nuclear energy. And then we are onto offshore drilling. I think Obama is forgetting the fact that its not just a matter of getting us away from reliance on “hostile” nations (ahh, that is more hostile than big bully U.S.). It’s saving the lives of our people, and the only way to do that is to save our planet. OIl spills, tanker crashes, urban runoff from all that crap is causing disease. Children playing at our beaches would bear the brunt. All this is not worth “peoples jobs in the industries, local economy, or money as whole”. Skillsets are transferrable to clean energy and other technology areas, peoples lives are not. Its time our nation wises up to the lie we will all go broke, die, or freeze in the dark if we turn to clean energy sources ONLY, and the one source that is available now, very cheap, and better for your health overall. It’s called energy efficiency, or better yet energy conservation. If people stop feeling like they need to have every rediculous new gadget (which all bring their own health problems) such as a “smartpnhone” which is not so smart, Wii, Internet TV, and video games galore, they would save lots of unecessary energy. The most progressive people I see today are those forgoing the myriad of new toys….middle and middle/upper people that were technology evangelist are doing away with a microwave oven, TV, have maybe 1 PC in home (not bunch of laptops), cell phones don’t burp and fart for them……And they are happeir for it. Might even have one of those old fashioned things called a real conversation with their family and friends. Not to mention less electo-pollution. Europe is far ahead of the U.S. in enviro regulations since adopting Kyoto protocol, hence a healtier nation all together. Wireless tech being banned from schools in Scandinvavian and other countries due to health risks being researched. Your pictures are great, some reimind me of movie Wall-E