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TechnoratiGreenwash: Why 'Clean Coal' is the Ultimate Climate Change Oxymoron
The people who told us for years that climate change was a myth now say it's all true – but something called 'clean coal' can fix it. This is pure and utter greenwash.
Next week, Americans are being invited to take part in what could become the largest act of civil disobedience against global warming in the country's history. People are protesting at the coal-fired power plant that powers legislators on Capitol Hill in Washington DC.
![[No clean-coal plant that buries carbon has yet been built. Photograph: Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images]](http://www.commondreams.org/files/article_images/coal.jpg "coal.jpg")
Cynics
may say it's about time Americans joined the action. The fact is that
too many Americans have been bamboozled for too long by a campaign of
disinformation about the science of climate change.
Many still think the whole question of mankind's role in global warming
is disputed in scientific circles (I expect the comments beneath this
blog will soon demonstrate this point).
Hopefully, that science battle is slowly being won. But now the big greenwash is coming from another direction. Now, we have a technology battle. The people who told us for years how climate change was a myth now say it is all true - but something called "clean coal" can fix it.
It's hard to keep track of the differing organisations behind this. First there was Americans for Balanced Energy Choices. Last year that merged with the Center for Energy and Economic Development to create the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE). That body is now headlining as something called America's Power. The one thing they have got is money. Money to try and persuade us that coal is good, coal is green and coal is the solution to America's energy needs.
The ACCCE spent $38m last year buying TV, newspaper and magazine space to persuade Americans that coal can be clean and carbon-free. The money mostly came from its members in the coal mining, transportation and burning industries.
You don't see much coal in these ads, though in December its website did feature some singing lumps of coal called the "clean coal carollers". Sadly they went shy about that and the carollers now seem to be on indeterminate holiday leave.
The money doesn't all go into airtime and column inches, of course. According to SourceWatch, almost $1m goes to pay the salary of its president and chief executive officer Stephen L Miller.
But the big PR question, the one that must earn Miller his remuneration, is how to rationalise this oxymoron "clean coal". How to square this carefully created image with inconvenient facts about the fuel's huge carbon footprint - greater than other fossil fuels such as oil and natural gas.
The genius is that they don't really try. Blink and you might miss it. That word "clean" is highly flexible. It can mean what you want it to mean. So for instance, ACCCE claims that modern coal power plants are "70% cleaner".
It sounds good. It sounds like coal really is cleaning up. Perhaps the greenies are behind the times. Call off the demo. But check more closely and you'll notice that the ACCCE doesn't mention which gases are covered by this claim. In fact, the industry has cut emissions of sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxides under acid-rain legislation enacted years ago. That's what the 70% refers to. But it has not cut planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions.
Its other key strategy is to promote carbon capture and storage (CCS). That is, the idea of catching carbon dioxide before it goes up the stack of a power plant, and burying it out of harm's way underground - forever. It promotes the idea and not the technology, because there is currently no such technology.
But ACCCE has faith. It doesn't argue that CCS can solve coal's environment problems. If it did, it might have to defend its case. Instead, it says "we believe that American can continue to make great progress in improving environmental quality while at the same time enjoying the benefits from using domestic energy sources like coal ... In a word: we believe in technology." Good for them, but technologists generally rely on more than faith.
As I have reported here before, this technology is scientifically conjectural, especially at the storage end. And even on an optimistic view of its feasibility, it is at least two decades and several tens of billions of research and development dollars away from actual commercial operation on any scale. Don't take my word for it. Check out the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's study on the matter. Or this study by the International Energy Agency. Bear in mind these reports were written before the US government last year pulled out of FutureGen, its only large-scale R&D programme for carbon-capture technology.
An industry confident of the technology's future might have been expected to plug the funding gap and keep right on going. But not so far. An analysis of ACCCE's members in December by the Center for American Progress found that their total investment in R&D for carbon capture and storage in recent years added up to a total of $3.5bn, compared with profits for one year of $57bn. Sorry, but belief isn't enough. Put up or shut up.
They should be laughed out of court. But what is most worrying is the political traction the clean-coal story is gaining. Sadly, President Obama may be part of the faith brigade. During the election campaign last year, he was quoted telling the people of Michigan that "you can't tell me we can't figure out how to burn coal that we mine right here in the USA and make it work."
It's not a great quote, but it's the best the ACCCE could come up with, and they have run ads with it.
The trouble with CCS right now is that it is being sold as an imminent fix when it is very far from that. And it is being sold as a reason to carry on supporting the coal industry. After all, the argument runs, if we pull the plug on new coal-fired power plants now, then how will they fund the R&D that could deliver clean coal one day?
That is a very dangerous argument indeed. It is the reason why Nasa climate scientist James Hansen is supporting the demonstration in DC, and insists that no new coal-fired power stations should be built unless and until all their carbon dioxide can be captured and buried forever.
Sadly, for too many policy-makers, the idea that we can have coal and tackle climate change at the same time is too good to miss. Sadly, it is too good to be true.
72 Comments so far
Show AllDon't know if Obama is going to go the right way on this or not. As of his address to both houses of the legislature, he was still talking "clean coal."
What's really needed to move public opinion on this issue is a countering ad campaign, with a clear, down to earth, funny and memorable image. Something like "going green with clean coal is like trying to diet on pizza and donuts" (show somebody trying to lose weight, with a pizza and donut salesman pushing more food at him telling him it really will help him lose weight -- trust me!")
This would be a great job for David Fenton's agency in Washington or Public Media Center in San Francisco.
I've thought up a couple of new slogans for clean energy a few months ago...zero-input energy (which is a fancy way of saying no fuel is needed to produce energy), effortless energy (build it, sit back, and watch it produce energy), etc. These fossil fuel corporations are stealing the old slogans, promoting Clean Coal and Clean Natural Gas, or Clean and Renewable Nuclear Power (yes, they're promoting it as renewable!)
How does this sound? Offshore wind and tidal, rooftop and parking lot/freeway solar panels or heaters, solar thermal plants in deserts, geothermal and wind in suitable areas, conservation, energy efficient electronics and buildings, and much more mass transit.
These are the types of things that are needed--a combination of solutions which could be carefully implemented to avoid wholesale disturbances to the environment.
Ok, no coal, no nuclear power, no oil or gas, then no people. I mean, what is your solution, cull the herd, go back to being cave men, burn trees or plants?.
Wind and solar?
Wind requires great tracts of land to produce the same amount of energy as a nuclear or conventional power plant. Wind patterns can be erratic. Even if the wind blows fairly regularly in an area, physical design requirements limit the speeds at which the turbines work. This means that you cannot make the most use of the available energy contained in the wind.
Because of the irregularity of wind, there always has to be a back-up power source available (gas, coal, oil, nuclear) making the back up power more expensive since it would be operating at design capacity intermittently. Wind requires a high level of government subsidy to operate. In colder areas, icing makes them deadly as ice flung from the windmills are a projectile hazard. They are also very expensive to maintain and are subject to storm damage.
Solar. Solar energy is inefficient. However, building plants in deserts or areas where there is a lot of sun and not much use for the large amounts of land needed make sense, even if not a viable complete alternative to coal, oil, nuclear and gas. Outfitting each house for solar and maintaining it would use more power and fuel than the solar system would produce, at least in the first few years, and it would be much more expensive and unaffordable to 80% of the population in the US w/o huge government subsidies, and in many areas is just not an option due to the lack of enough sunlight to be viable.
Geothermal.
http://www1.eere.energy.gov/geothermal/faqs.html
Actually, all currently US electric consumption could be generated in the area of comprising a quarter of North Dakota. Of curse, even in the Dakotas the wind occasionally doesn't blow. But similar wind generation capacity is available southward through the Great Plains to Texas. The Great Lakes and offshore New England are also good wind sites. And, the wind is always blowing somewhere over this large an area.
So, we need to improve the electrical distribution system to shuttle the power around, but that is doable.
Just the same, I don't want to put the eggs all in one basket, so some mew nuclear development, in conjunction with retiring coal plants makes sense too.
---USAn---
What about the rest of the world. You think we won't be exporting our coal to China to burn there w/o clean technology. Wind is very expensive, developing nations could never afford it even if they had the land and wind, and as you say, we need backup power sources for days when there is no wind or it does not blow in enough areas or in the right direction, so the cost for this redundancy would be astronomical.
And what about all the energy and resources for mining and making the materials and then fabricating and assembly, then transportation and installation charges, not to mention the maintenance issues I mentioned, or the fact we still need liquid fuels for vehicles and our military which consumes more energy than most countries. Do you realize how many windmills this would require?.
And all that land being used for wind mills, you really think it won't affect the wildlife there, especially birds? How about climate, converting wind to energy produces heat and reduces wind that cools the land, not to mention the heat absorbed from the sun by hundreds of thousands of windmills on the land, surely it would have some effect on local climate (not that the models could tell us what effect).
Also, most of the sources of solar panels and wind turbines are located in Europe and Asia. They'd have to be imported.
MimiCcs,
You'll say absolutely anything, won't you, to put questions in people's minds about climate change and true alternative energies? Please stop your nonsensical campaign of smoke-and-mirrors misinformation.
Some panels and wind generators are made in the US. Others aren't, and yet somehow I think we will manage to get them here if we need them. It's not like our current energy comes from elsewhere, right? There are indeed solar and wind installations going up in developing countries. Check out old issues of the American Solar Energy Society journal. They have used our "help" to build destructive dams and coal burners; now they will use our help to build inexpensive, ecological, democratic energy systems. Both they and we will be better off for it. That includes China and India, who need both our example and our money to make the transition with us.
We WILL need to use fossil fuels to remake our infrastructure fast enough. Crash programs are inefficient, and it is unfortunate that we have let people like you delay effective action in saving civilization and the biosphere for so long. It is what we, and you, have to live with now.
Utility lines, cars and trucks, buildings, cell phone towers, smoke stacks, pesticides, cats and other sources kill more than a billion birds a year. Habitat destruction here and in the tropics kills even more, and all those are getting worse. Household scale wind generators? 0. Other wind generators--.01% of the total and shrinking per generator, as we have learned more about siting and design. Stop waving this ridiculous lie around as if you actually care what happens to birds and other wildlife.
Stop criticizing solar and wind for mining and processing damage, which is a tiny fraction of a percent of what is done for coal, nuclear and oil.
Compared to coal, oil, nuclear and gas's devastating effects, renewable sources--solar, wind, locally appropriate tidal, geothermal, cogeneration and others--have miniscule bad effects. That is not to say they have no effect, and of course we should continue to reduce them--by reducing our energy use, becoming more efficient, and by technical fixes of the energy sources themselves. But it is absolutely unarguable that they are better ecologically than fossil and nuclear fuels.
If you really cared about any of the things you criticize these energy sources for, MimiCcs, you would be a gung-ho conservation, solar and wind energy fan.
What we need for vehicles (besides a huge increase in walking, bicycling and rail--all of which is happening) is what will be: a near-perfect system of electric vehicles recharging from roof-and-parking-lot-cover solar collectors at work and home,(and some wind generators) thus moving us around AND providing a daily-rechargable portable energy storage system.
...
PJD,
I too, believe in putting eggs in as many baskets as possible, which is why huge nuclear reactors, coal burners and fragile, centralized transmission grids are a bad idea and household solar is such a good one. Small, decentralized, virtually terrorism-proof, economically democratic... great in every way!
...
Conservation, wind, solar. Cheaper, faster, better. Ecological, democratical. Better in every way.
A gold mine of disinformation is not a title to be proud of.
http://www.electricityforum.com/wind-generated-electricity.html
The costs of wind energy
The cost of wind energy is determined by:
the initial cost of the wind turbine installation
the interest rate on the money invested
the amount of energy produced
Any Wind Generated Electricityturbine that is installed in a very windy area generates less expensive power than the same unit installed in a less windy area. So it’s important to assess the wind at the potential site. Modern wind turbine generators cost between $1500 and $2000 per kilowatt for wind farms that use multiple-unit arrays of large machines. Smaller individual units cost up to $3000 per kilowatt. In good wind areas, the costs of generating power range between five and ten cents per kilowatt hour. That cost is somewhat higher than the costs associated with an electrical facility, but wind energy costs are decreasing every year, whereas most conventional generation costs continue to increase.
In remote areas, generating power with diesel generators can range from $0.25 to $1.00 per kilowatt hour. So in good areas, power that is generated in this way is clearly cost effective. When compared to the money that is charged by electrical companies, wind energy costs are nearly competitive. And that is without accounting for the environmental and health benefits of using a non-polluting source of energy.
Using wind energy around the world
The use of Wind Generated Electricity turbine generators is growing around the world. In terms of installation and operation worldwide, the wind power industry now turns over more than 9 billion USD. At the end of 2004, 47,000 megawatts of wind-generated electricity produced some 92 TWh of electricity. That is sufficient energy for the power needs of Portugal and Greece combined.
2005 was a record year for new installed capacity in Canada. As of April 2006 Canada’s installed breeze turbine energy capacity was 944 MW, enough to power more than 280,000 homes.
.......
worth repitition:
That cost is somewhat higher than the costs associated with an electrical facility, but wind energy costs are decreasing every year, whereas most conventional generation costs continue to increase.
and again:
When compared to the money that is charged by electrical companies, wind energy costs are nearly competitive. And that is without accounting for the environmental and health benefits of using a non-polluting source of energy.
"Most people would sooner die than think, in fact they do so." Bertrand Russell
Your information is almost completely inaccurate and I don't have time to correct it all.
------------------------------
You said...
Wind requires a high level of government subsidy to operate.
------------------------------
Whatever the current costs of energy be sure to factor in the Iraq War. 3 to 5 trillion $$ is the best estimate. (To procure a couple extra decades of access to oil).
Then factor in all the death and disease that comes from burning carbon. It has to cost at least a couple trillion to treat the cancer it causes alone.
Then factor in all the enviromental damage done by using oil. This cost is incalculable as burning carbon contributes to global warming and may kill millions of species, billions of humans and make the world largely unliveable for thousands of years.
How does that compare to wind power now?
The money for Iraq is all spent, you won't get it back, and it's far more than a couple of decades supply of oil there. Most of Iraq has not been drilled. Global reserves have doubled over the last 35 years when they were telling us we were running out then.
CO2 feeds plants, nobody ever died from CO2, and global warming killing people and millions of species is a myth.
It isn't a myth, it is a prediction based on data.
There is a big difference.
I am not going to claim that a prediction based on data necessarily will be correct, but it deserves more attention than a myth.
Oil is a finite resource. It's not being made at this time, the reserves of oil cannot double, they can only go down.
CO2 will kill you if there is too much of it. Thousands have died from sticking their heads in a plastic bag to commit suicide by breathing CO2.
Well, reserves have doubled since 1975 despite consumption doubling, and we were supposed to be running out soon, so said the experts then, while climate scientists were predicting the coming ice age.
The CO2 they kill themselves with was produced by themselves, not oil.
As you'll see if you read the many corrections of George Will's egregiously innacurate columns, there was never even a sizable minority who believed we were headed for an ice age. In fact, many scientists were saying then what they are saying now, that we are headed for potentially disastrous warming IF we don't change our lives. What's changed in the intervening decades is that research supporting and filling out the details of climate catastrophe has piled up sky high, and the fact that almost all scientists agree who have have any expertise in one of the many fields involved in climate (and are not paid by oil and coal companies). (Climatology, geology, oceanography, palynology, ecology, botany, biology, zoology, entomology, dendrology, ornithology, and many others.) What hasn't changed is that the corporate media are still mostly getting it wrong.
http://climateprogress.org/2009/03/03/new-york-times-climate-coverage-1970s-science-not-global-cooling...
The time for debate is over, except for how fast and how best to achieve the needed 100% renewable energy society, and what mix of solar, wind and conservation will be best in each region.
MimiCcs once posted that Obama's book was ghost written when it was McCain's. She's lost her cred.
Well if he did not ghost write the book written his first year as Senator, he should return his salary. I am certain he wrote Dreams From My Father though.
I'm sure the "news" professionals at CNN, Fox, ABC, NBC etc. will expose the myth of clean coal so that every American knows the facts.
After all, they unmasked the obvious lies that would've sent us to an endless black-hole of a war in Iraq, right?
OOps!
PS...The Fairness Doctrine is now dead. It's open-season again on gullible Americans! Clean coal for everyone!
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iZo8HqKUQ5LkGkTf0CiQtS7WQlQQD96JG0PO4
U.S. Citizen
Just to clarify and repeat. Even if they find a way to bury the carbon emissions, we still have the problem of destroying mountain tops and the ash from the coal. Also, we have no idea about the effects of putting more carbon in the ground.
Regarding nuclear power, aside from the other negatives mentioned, we may create a bigger problem with the nuclear waste.
Amen! Coal mining degrades the land.
[shaking head in disbelief]
How many brainwashed Americans have already bought into the "clean coal" propaganda?
"The fact is that too many Americans have been bamboozled for too long by a campaign of disinformation about the science of climate change."
That's an understatement. But the greater understatement is that too many USans have been bamboozled for too long by a campaign of disinformation about EVERYTHING.
It suggests that we should focus on the enlightenment of the people, NOW. We surely have all kinds of other ideas about the problems and the solutions. Lots of different people pursuing lots of different solutions in lots of different ways is a GREAT thing, EXCEPT when the problems are so entrenched that solutions cannot gain traction. We need the freedom to apply our preferred approaches when we can, but we have to change approaches temporarily in order to regain traction. Let's temporarily switch at least 25% of our energy to a united front to achieve the people's enlightenment.
The only reason that we reject the people's enlightenment is because we are all vulnerable to the elites' "oppressions of mind" and we are individually guilty of aiding the elites and their miserable class hierarchy. And so while we work on our privately formulated private solutions to make our private marks we are neglecting the public interests and inadvertently buttressing the elites' class hierarchy of institutional greed, ignorance and domination/submission.
Enlighten the people to enable the people to fight elite domination. The people will act through free will to build the better society. This approach certainly does amount to a necessary hierarchy of ideas. BUT this necessity is due to some ideas aligning better with the truth, empirical evidence, laws of nature. The truth dominates untruths. People need not dominate each other when the truth prevails. We are ultimately trying to build a better society here and discovering and disseminating a hierarchy of ideas is necessary to build classlessness among people, universal equity, and the great benefits that come out of that, such as the ability to reject all the elites' rackets, "clean coal" and all the rest.
Hear, Hear!
But it's not about information. I realized that 25 years ago when I started and effectively ended a career in environmental education.(except for ongoing volunteer and freelance work) It's about psychological blocks to our creative responses; it's about the difficulty (but not impossibility) of learning things outside of the single (unique and extraordinarily complex but still limiting) physio-emotional story we tell ourselves about ourselves and the world. People who have done the necessary work on themselves can choose consciously what they do; the rest continue to respond to unconscious desires (which they deny, thus the "unconscious" part) and lack of true connection to people and the rest of Nature.
We can't just spread information and hope to create change. We have to continue to make ourselves more effective instruments of compassion and connection.
France and Italy just signed an agreement for the delivery of four French nuclear power plants, to be operational "before 2020". That just shows how ridiculous the idea of saving ourselves with nuclear energy is. We need alternative energy now, another twelve years of coal is going to tip us over. And anyway, the total carbon costs of developing nuclear plants hardly make them any cleaner than coal and oil.
The 100% foolproof way to make coal clean is to not mine or burn it.
Appalachia has been bombed, blasted and bulldozed right into 3rd world America ! We can't stand anymore of the Bush Legacy of progress and prosperity
www.wisecountyissues.com
This is TOXIC TERRORISM !
thomas jefferson 2;25 p.m.;
Your "slogans" are spot-on.Please distribute them as widely as your resources permit.
Why is no-one talking about Geothermal, the best solution?
Why is Hansen pushing nukes?
Geothermal electric generation is only practical in certain, active volcanic areas. In the US, that means a scattering places in the Cascades in the NW, and Yellowstone Park. Period.
There is also some lower temperature geothermal potential where the heat from radioactive decay in granite bodies are well-insulated by overlying sediments, creating a higher than normal geothermal gradient. Sites where this effect great enought to generate steam within an economically viable drilling depth are also rare.
Geothermal power is or could be a big contributor in volcanic islands like Iceland, the Canary Islands, Hawaii or Indonesia; maybe Central America, not too many other places.
When the earth was a couple billion years younger, there was much more U235 in naturally ocurring uranium. Thus it was enriched enough that uranium deposits in water bearing sandstones or other rocks would form natural nuclear reactors. The remains of one such natural reactor was found in Oklo, Gabon. It ran for a few hundred thousand years, at about 100 kw of power output.
Such natural reactors may heve been fairly common in those old days.
---USAn---
"Geothermal electric generation is only practical in certain, active volcanic areas. In the US, that means a scattering places in the Cascades in the NW, and Yellowstone Park. Period"
If heat recovered by ground source heat pumps is included, the non-electric generating capacity of geothermal energy is estimated at more than 100 GW (gigawatts of thermal power) and is used commercially in over 70 countries. During 2005, contracts were placed for an additional 0.5 GW of capacity in the United States, while there were also plants under construction in 11 other countries.[10]
Estimates of exploitable worldwide geothermal energy resources vary considerably. According to a 1999 study, it was thought that this might amount to between 65 and 138 GW of electrical generation capacity 'using enhanced technology'.[11]
A 2006 report by MIT, that took into account the use of Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS), concluded that it would be affordable to generate 100 GWe (gigawatts of electricity) or more by 2050 in the United States alone, for a maximum investment of 1 billion US dollars in research and development over 15 years.[10]
The MIT report calculated the world's total EGS resources to be over 13,000 ZJ. Of these, over 200 ZJ would be extractable, with the potential to increase this to over 2,000 ZJ with technology improvements - sufficient to provide all the world's present energy needs for several millennia.[10]
The key characteristic of an EGS (also called a Hot Dry Rock system), is that it reaches at least 10 km down into hard rock. At a typical site two holes would be bored and the deep rock between them fractured. Water would be pumped down one and steam would come up the other. The MIT report estimated that there was enough energy in hard rocks 10 km below the United States to supply all the world's current needs for 30,000 years.[10] However, favourable locations for EGS (eg in central Australia) may require wells only 4 kilometres (2 mi) deep.[citation needed]
Drilling at this depth is now possible in the petroleum industry, although it is an expensive process. For example, Exxon has announced an 11-kilometre (7 mi) hole at the Chayvo field, Sakhalin.[12] Wells drilled to depths greater than 4 kilometres (2 mi) generally incur drilling costs in the tens of millions of dollars.[citation needed] The technological challenges are to drill wide bores at low cost and to break rock over larger volumes. Apart from the energy used to make the bores, the process releases no greenhouse gases.
Other important countries considered high in potential for development are the People's Republic of China, Hungary, Mexico, Iceland, and New Zealand. A number of potential sites are being developed or evaluated in South Australia that are several kilometres in depth.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_power
My own company is utilyzing such sources of generation:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/02/15/BU21V2S7J.DTL
Geothermal to help PG&E meet renewable goal
David R. Baker, Chronicle Staff Writer
Friday, February 15, 2008
Pacific Gas and Electric Co. will turn to Earth's own energy to meet a looming state deadline for using more renewable power.
The utility is expected to announce today that it has signed an agreement with Calpine Corp. to buy more electricity from The Geysers geothermal field north of Calistoga, where steam heated deep underground powers electric generators on the surface.
San Francisco's PG&E already buys power from The Geysers, and the amount added under the new contract isn't much - roughly enough for 42,750 homes. But with it, 20 percent of PG&E's contracts for future energy supplies will come from renewable resources.
And for California utilities, 20 percent is the magic number.
The state has ordered its investor-owned utilities to ensure that 20 percent of the power they sell comes from sources such as the sun, the wind, the earth or the ocean. PG&E, Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric all have until the end of 2010 to meet that requirement.
Getting there hasn't been easy, and PG&E appears to be the first to do it.
Southern California Edison has enough contracts to reach 16 or 17 percent, one of the utility's spokesmen said Thursday. San Diego Gas & Electric did not respond to a request for information Thursday, but company officials warned last year that they would probably miss the state deadline.
"We're proud to have reached this milestone, and we're going to continue to add renewable energy to our power mix," PG&E spokesman Keely Wachs said.
Even PG&E's achievement comes with a caveat. The company now has enough power contracts to hit 20 percent, but some of those contracts won't kick in until after the state deadline passes, delivering power to PG&E customers in 2011. That isn't a legal problem. If a utility falls just short of 20 percent by the end of 2010, it can still comply with the law by overshooting the 20 percent goal the following year.
"Most people would sooner die than think, in fact they do so." Bertrand Russell
But, but, but President Obama said clean coal was a reality....Joe Hope must be on suicide watch.
"Most people would sooner die than think, in fact they do so." Bertrand Russell
But isn't the problem precisely that they do not die? If the thinkers really did survive would we really be in this mess?
Instead of dying, they vote for people they would like to have a beer with and hope for the end-times so they can join the Rapture.
O.K class, Are we starting to see how Empire propaganda works in the USA? Now let's see if we can translate these cryptic Neocon phrases into English:
"Clean Coal" = deadly smoke killing your grandchildren
"Safe Nuclear Power" = ticking time bomb in your backyard
"Operation Iraqi Liberation" = Operation OIL for Exxon profits.
"Clear Skies Act" = What they were before this exemption on smokestack emissions was passed.
"Patriot Act" = End of everything the original patriots fought for.
Stimulus package = Free money to bankster/gansters paid by you in the form of higher taxes and future inflation
Ken Lewis (BofA) = Ken Lay (Enron)
O.K, class, I think that's enough for now. We don't want anyone popping more than 100 big pharma meds a day....
TJ
"All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent." - Thomas Jefferson
:-)
West Virginia,Kentucky,and Virginia are all behind devastated by MTR.Also,I understand this hideous practice is happening in some western areas too.The affected areas look most like they've been carpet bombed,with the added bonus that much of the exposed earth is also highly toxic.These lying,thieving,US corporations can't have their insatiable greed slaked by destroying lands abroad-they have zero empathy for their fellow citizens.
If Obama was in ANY sense a moderate,let alone a progressive,one of the first plans he would have announced is an immediate halt to ALL MTR.
I'm a WVa.native living in Wisconsin,but as tha adage goes,once a Mountaineer,always a Mountaineer.It pains so deeply to see film of the damage,has the rest of the US been loathe to attack MTR because the locals are "just Hillbillies"? Well,WVa.has lost about 20% of it's population already and MTR if not stopped will accelerate that displacement.As I write this I know it's futile to say,but Shame on Massey,Peabody,et.al.The locals always had the courage to mine the coal under dangerous conditions and the profits were substantial.If there is any power to the theory of bad Karma,the execs. responsible for this are to be pitied.
Montani Semper Liberi
What happens when the coal companies try to expand MTR and strip mining into relatively populated and wealthy areas of PA, OH, KY? Could be fireworks.
Ther are no MTR suitable areas in those states. There is a lot of MTR going on in eastern Kentucky - an area that is poorer than souhthern West Virginia.
Nearly all strip minable coal in Pennsysvalna, SE Ohio, and the western Kentucky and southern Illinois coal fields has already been mined. MTR methods weren't used because the terain isn't very rugged. Many of these area (particularly in Pennsylvania) were reclaimed to original contours fairly well and most people wouldn't notice the area was ever mined. MTR mined area will be obvious for a long, long time.
---USAn---
Thanks PJD. Ever been to Centralia, PA? The coal mine has been on slow burn fire for decades.
They don't put it in caverns, they put it in porous sedimentary rock strata saturated with salt water. Alternatively they use similar depleted oil/gas bearing formations. Ihe capacity of these formations is enormous - enough to cover the use of all remaining coal reserves.
BUT, the technology is unproven and likely far too expensive if applied to full-scale power plants.
The "clean coal" argument is largely just intelligense insulting bullshit from industry, they shout "clean coal" while ramming through plans for contentional power plants without a single provision in them for carbon capture and storage.
---USAn---
Oh? and what technology is that, John? Nukes, I suppose? I am going to argue with the idea that we must "come close to satisfying the immediate, unquenchable appetite for electrical energy in the US and the world" by pointing out that people lived with zero electricity until a mere century ago--I lived without electricity for 25 years and didn't count it a problem. We do not need to destroy the atmosphere and climate, or half the mountains in West Virginia, or risk catastrophes of several sorts by going the nuclear route, because we will all immediately die if we don't have 30 KwH per day per household and a couple of big vehicles.
But if we eliminate waste, embrace efficiency, and learn to consume at a more reasonable level, we can convert fairly rapidly to solar and wind and a few other technologies, while gradually shutting down the existing coal fleet. I appreciate pandronodrim's insider comment here, and agree Biggers' Big Coal book is a good read.
The coal industry is trying to use PR as a cheap substitute for a viable solution. Unfortunately for them, the cheapest and most viable solutions to our energy needs do not include coal, except as something temporary to be phased out.
Even with big reductions in electricity usage, nuclear must have a part in any crash program to a carbon free electricity supply.
Only in the superstitious, scientifically illiterate US is ther so much opposition to nuclear power.
A new proposed nuclear power plant near Toronto has lots of popular support, including environmentalists in the province. Bids are being prepared and they hope to have it on line in about 6 years.
You will find few French environmentalists who oppose nuclear power either.
---USAn---
"Bids are being prepared and they hope to have it on line in about 6 years."
And that is one of many reasons why nuclear power will be of little help.
Six years to build for any kind of major works project - dam, large bridge, power plant, urban freeway, is very fast! A major wind farm will take comparable length of time as well.
---USAn---
A single wind turbine can be built and hooked up to power lines in a couple days. If there are enough materials on hand and people to build them, a wind farm will be quite quicker to build than a nuclear plant.
Are you an engineer or in the construction business?
You are foregetting the wind studies, design and bidding process, permit application, environmental impact studies, public noitces.
And the physical construction of a 300 ft tall wind turbine certainly takes longer than a couple days. That isn't even enough time for the foundation concrete to cure.
And remember you need to build 400-500 large wind turbines to equal a one power plant.
---USAn---
You're out of your bloody mind. No, son. None of us up here in Canada like the idea of using nuke plants. They have huge safety issues (meltdowns, leaks, etc.) in normal operating times, then there's the chance of them being blown up by a whacko group of nutballs. Not to mention that there's still no way of safely disposing of the waste that any nuke plant generates.
There are no environmentalist who would support the building of these plants.
The economists don't support them either, they cost too much to build, too much to operate, and they never get a return on the investment.
You almost had me thinking there until you invoked economists.
Why would a class of people with such a fundamental basic misunderstanding of the unsustainability of an exponential growth and usage curve have to say about anything that you could possibly believe.
No economist has ever managed to predict anything interesting. They are politico's who baffle the politicians and the public with very poorly thought through models and mathematics as window-dressing.
Believe me, nuclear doesn't pay over coal right now because the public has been far more active in making the full costs of nuclear accountable. If you really included the costs of climate change in the construction and operation of coal plants I can guarantee you that nuclear would today be the cheapest source of power on the planet save that from a hydroelectric dam.
Physicscitizen,
I recall reading that you work on the LHC at CERN. Being as you are a psysicist in Europe, are you familiar with the ITER fusion project? It gets no press in the US at all.
Do you have any opinion on the prospects of fusion energy - particularly if it could get better funding?
I recall a few years ago, there was media noise, oddly mostly from far-right groups about US subsidized private ventures to mine He3 from lunar soil for use in fusion energy. It seemed a crazy prospect since we haven't even shown D-T fusion can be done, much less He3 fusion, and if we masterd He3 fusion, we could probably do D-D fusion, Deuterium being readily avaialble on earth. Any thoughts?
---USAn---
Hi!
Yes you are correct I am a physicist with research projects at CERN.
ITER is not directly related to my own research but it is a project that I know a bit about, I probably know more about it than the gory details climate modeling anyway.
Fusion certainly is the only and final solution to our energy problems. The process powers the sun and stars and, if we can get to the stage where we fuse deuterium (hydrogen atom with one proton and one neutron in the nucleus) into Helium then you actually produce NO radioactive remains....indeed the only energy produced are gamma rays and gamma rays cannot activate the surrounding containment vessel at all (this is prevented by physical law and is therefore completely idiot prooof).
Unfortunately the first step in fusion will be a tritium-deuterium reaction which will produce a spare neutron. But even there the waste produced is actually again not radioactive but the spare neutrons can get absorbed by the containment vessel and activate it. But this would be the cleanest energy source ever developed even then because the remaining levels when the machine is off are so very low and the amount of material compared to the energy you get out of it is tiny.
There have been some very astonishing breakthoughs in the last decade even without US help (the USA stopped funding fusion research in the 1990's and early 2000...such shortsightedness had bipartisan support). So much so that most people are pretty confident that ITER will actually hit break-even point...meaning that it will be capable of generating as much power as it uses to keep the reaction going.
Through a major international agreement that actually delayed ITER by a year or two it was agreed that the NEXT site will be located in Japan (Japan really wanted ITER badly) and that the NEXT test reactor will use the research gained at ITER with the goal of being the very first fusion energy plant.
Problems are many. This is a VERY HARD thing to do. That's why we haven't been able to do it. So I estimate that the plant in Japan (the one we need) is at least 20 years away. And that's the first prototype. commercial or even government sponsored fusion plants are 40-50 years in the future. If I'm an optimist.
Sat.'s comments below are absolutely true in regard to fission power. Uranium 235 is NOT a renewable resource, it is mined like coal. And it will run out.
But I support the building of Nuclear plants only as a stop-gap. It is a way of reversing all the coal plant construction with power plants that have about the right lifetime. And the volume of waste a fission plant produces compared to the energy you get out of it is factors of 10 less than coal. We would need to dispose of the waste and this would be expensive because we would either need to drop it down into the Mariannes trench, lock it away in salt mines, or better yet, fire it off into space and use a gravity assist from Jupiter to give it solar escape velocity (never to be seen again). This is really expensive and the only reason I consider nuclear is because it is ready. It is a stop=gap, it is non-polluting compared to coal (people who complain about nuclear waste simply do not appreciate the differences in scale between coal and nuclear). Also the plants constructed today in places like France and china are vastly more safe. It is a technology we need to save our planet until we can develop the final energy source, the one that the sun uses, fusion.
Now you might worry about fusion because of the hydrogen bomb. Cannot fusion plants explode like a hydrogen bomb? Actually, no they cannot. I can try to explain the reasons if you want sometime but here's an easy way to think about it.
Fusion is not like fission. Fusion is very hard to achieve. With Fission, once you get the Uranium you just have to stack it up in a big pile and it will get all radioactive and hot and blow itself apart in a dirty explosion (it will be a real dud of an explosion but the clean-up will be hell).
Controlled fusion is so hard that if ANYTHING goes wrong the reaction just stops. If any part of the process needed for interial confinement fails then the confinement fails and the fusion reaction stops. With no reaction there is no release of energy and an explosion requires a violent release of energy. With no reaction there is no more production of radioactivity.
Fusion is so hard to achieve that it really is idiot proof. Every plant WILL be inherently safe. It will either work, or it will fail and just stop producing energy.
The business about mining He3 from the Moon is complete crap. The only way that would work is if we already have fusion, it is common place, and compact, and we can use fusion-driven space vessels to make regular lunar trips....then there is the problem that no one has actually determined if there really is a lot of mineable He3 on the moon or not! There SHOULD be, but we don't actually know this!
Keep an eye on Bob Park for stories debunking most energy claims.
He's a physicist at Maryland and has a brief segment every week.
http://www.bobpark.org/
bookmark it and read it every Friday.
PJD, physicscitizen,
Hey,
You two guys are great! Do you do a standup routine, too? How 'bout a Vegas show?
Yes, we've heard it before. "Reluctantly, AS A LAST RESORT, I support the use of (fill in the blank). Nuclear power, torture, capital punishment, Draconian drug laws, massive supermax prison-building programs, internment camps, invasions and occupations, nuclear weapons, mass murder and genocide. It's all OK! All you have to do is say "I had to do it."*
"I had to do it!" It's the new "I was only following orders."
And it eliminates the uncomfortable processes of thinking and feeling! You don't have to question your assumptions or look at the effects or think systemically or ecologically--all things that I know give you headaches. Practice once or twice: I was only following... no sorry; I had to do it. I had to do it.
...
Conservation. Solar. Wind.
Tidal, geothermal and other side dishes. That's what will work. They are the only things that will work.
...
"I really didn't want to use sarcasm here, but there was no other way.
I had to do it."
See how easy it is?
*They made me do it/ You're making me do this" also works.
:-)
I should have said accountants, but even their reps have been tarneshed by the bush years. Even so, there is not enough uranium in accessable locations to fuel the earth's power needs. You could not use nuke plants to replace all the coal plants, you'd run out of fuel in 5 years, tops. Even if the nuke scientists were able to extract every joule of energy from the uranium, and by some alchemical reaction fully deplete the metal until it's indistinguishable from lead, there isn't enough of the stuff to replace coal plants.
Sorry physicscitizen, but the only way forward is to develop cleaner technologys for generating electricity. That means using tides, wind and solar energy. It also means cutting back on things that we really don't need.
I agree we do need to develop these things. Indeed I think we need to increase the research budgets for these things by factors of 10 or 20 over the next few years.
But they simply will have no lasting effect.
Population will outstrip ALL these technologies within a short span of decades and then war, disease, and starvation....time honored and highly effective natural means of population control....will take over.
Without population discussion, and I'm talking about, ultimately, REDUCING The population of our planet, none of these things will really matter in the end.
If we actually turned only to solar, wind, tides etc...to try to power our planet AND by some fantasy world population TODAY was frozen at the level it is NOW I would argue that we would STILL try to bring the standard of living of everyone on this planet to the level that 10% of us enjoy. That means 10 times the energy requirements for the SAME number of people as today.
I am pretty sure that this will be difficult, very difficult, with renewable resources without turning our planet into one huge power plant. Just what do you think happens to climate and to species and to nature when 1/10 the land surface is covered in black solar panels? What happens to wind and atmospheric climate patterns when we coat the plains with windmills that suck power out of our winds?
When we put in dams to resist the tides so that we can extract power from them we are destroying tidal ecosystems in a rather brutal fashion and if you look at the ultimate source of energy for tides it comes from the interplay of the moon's gravity and the rotation of the earth...if we resist this by extracting energy out of it we will change the earth's rotation. This sounds really ridiculous, and with ONE tidal plant or even many thousand it is ridiculous, but if you look at all the power you need and all the places you would be tempted to put one of these things up...maybe even destroying coastline to build special tide-pools for power generation...I strongly suspect you get quickly to worrying levels of energy extraction from the rotation of the earth itself.
I'd really like to see some deeper thinking when it comes to renewables. And a bit more of an admission that they are only a big help and not the final solution.
I my opinion all discussion of these solutions, with the exception of fusion power, are pretty dammed useless without a discussion of long-term population reduction. And that's why China, believe it or not, is the greenest country on this planet. They are the ONLY nation on earth, so far, with a long-term solution that will work...a one-child policy.
Hmmm, interesting. I am not advocating that the planet be covered with black tiles to generate solar power, you're using a straw man. I did find an interesting article in our local paper about the university of Alberta doing research into making smaller and more efficient solar panels.
I am trying to get a patent on a tidal power system that doesn't use the dam method to generate power, I think it's a doable thing, but until I have a patent...
Windmills themselves take up little room and farmers can still farm if they built their own generators on their land, but you are right that we can't rely solely on them.
If you, or other scientists, could develop a nuke plant that turned the uranium into lead, I'd support the idea of nuke plants. But think that it would be cheaper and more reasonable to develop fusion power instead.
You're quite right about population control. Either we do it ourselves, or nature will step in to do it for us.
All in all, I think we could agree that there is no such thing as 'clean' coal. That was what the article was talking about, and the idea that it can be made clean is something that is a boondoggle.
Yes certainly! (I hope you are still reading these threads!) "Clean coal" at the moment at least, is nothing but marketing. We should stop building coal plants today and start figuring out how to capture carbon from EXISTING plants.
I think that actually we agree about far more things than we disagree on.
Please never think that because I support building more nuclear plants in the short term that I actually support the nuclear power industry as any kind of long-term viable option, I do not.
And also please don't think that I'm against renewables, quite the contrary! I do very much agree with everyone here that their development and improvement is VITAL.
But we are looking at a many-faceted problem and I too often see us concentrating on really small effects and ignoring enormous elephants in the room.
On the scale of the problems we are facing as a civilization even 20 nuclear power plant meltdowns all occurring in the same year is actually a small problem. When you realize the truth of that statement many other things slot into perspective.
(I hope you are still reading these threads!)
Finally figured out how to track your own comments. A useful feature.
[On the scale of the problems we are facing as a civilization even 20 nuclear power plant meltdowns all occurring in the same year is actually a small problem. ]
That would greatly depend on the meltdowns wouldn't it? If the radioactivity is contained, the meltdown small, then using that best case scenario we could survive 20 of them. But if they were on the scale of a chernoble type meltdown, then you might want to rethink that opinion. I'm not sure that we could survive the cancers that such a disaster would cause.
you're not going to keep us in the dark, are you? tell us how to track our comments, please!
i've been copying and pasting url's to another document to check back later to see who's answered. But then, I'm a relative techno-tyro.
Top right of the browser you'll find a hyperlink that has your username. Click on it, then click on track. Everything you've commented on will be listed. Happy trails.
Drat I thought you'd found a way to actually find my comment history..This link shows new activity in threads, a useful tool certainly to monitor activity, but it fails to assist one in maintaining conversations and responses to ones individual efforts.....
"Most people would sooner die than think, in fact they do so." Bertrand Russell
Actually I know a person who has been researching the results of the Chernobyl meltdown and that was precisely what I had in mind.
First though, understand that such a meltdown with any plants that are likely to be built in the future would be impossible. Pebble-bed reactors are currently being constructed in China and they are designed to take advantage of physical laws to make them idiot-proof safe.
But even if I take the impossibility of 20 chernobyls in one year it STILL does not actually compare to the death-toll in Europe when record temperatures were reached there. or the death toll from the hurricanes, tornados, or the biggest natural killer of all..floods. And I'm not counting rising sea levels and tidal surges from normal storms either.
The death toll from these consequences of global climate change are severe and are already starting to appear.
They outstrip even 20 chernobyls.
I'm very serious about this.
So when you then back off from the ridiculous (we don't build Chernobyl-style plants any more) you begin to see just how deadly and dangerous coal and oil really are.
But this is a slow death, and a disconnected death.
While it is darned obvious who dies when a chernobyl goes critical.
So we continue to ignore the big effect that takes a decade to appear and concentrate on the small effect with more immediate consequences.
If we want to stop global warming we IMMEDIATELY stop building coal plants.
To continue our energy increase so that our standard of living improves we build nuclear plants instead. We start providing free contraception to ALL peoples of the world. We tax the hell out of any device or power plant that generates C02. We pour research into renewable energy, energy storage systems, and subsidize wind farms and solar panels (and solar hot water heaters) on the tops of houses. We dump the largest sources of research funing into ITER and fusion power as the real final solution..thinking about the long game over the short term.
We treat energy independence and zero population growth like we treated going to the moon and fear not the expense.
There was an interesting article in my local rag this morning about how David Suzuki (presents 'The Nature of Things' on CBC, a well known environmentalist) was a bit fuzzy in his thinking about how things are worse now then they have been in the past. It was quite a good read, you might find it interesting.
http://www.edmontonjournal.com/columnists/good+days/1339810/story.html
In short the author was pointing out that as bad as it is now, in times past, it's been a heck of a lot worse. Yes, coal plants can kill us in horrible numbers. In London, 5000 people died in a coalfired smog, but that's not happening at that rate anymore. But, should 20 chernoble's happen in a year, you can bet that the consequences will be longer lasting than any coal sort of disaster, as well as more lethal. Who buys food grown in Ukraine these days unless they have no choice? Think of what would happen if the 'idiot' proof reactor hired someone who was smart enough to prove them wrong when it came to 'fail safe' practices. There are ways to reduce the population that are just as effictive as birth control; just stop immunizing your kids, make sure they grow up in an environment where they're not exposed to germs in their own homes, and mother nature will take care of them quite well... (ok, that's a bit of a nasty way to control our population. But it's how we did it before b/c became affordable...)
Sorry, but there is no way coal is "going by the books" in a few years. An outright moratorium on coal plants will have about as much success as the moratorium on building nuclear bombs. And I even suppose that the fraudulant p.r. campaigns are partially designed to provoke just such a quixotic and self-defeating response.
A better tactic might be to drive up the costs of burning coal by getting better regulations on where they can be located, containment and disposal of their toxic sludge ponds, environmentally destructive mining operations,and even effciency guidlines for the use of the power generated. Special taxes could be imposed to help develop alternatives. Clean-up and liability bondings imposed.
But there is only one other source of power that will come even close to satisfying the immediate, unquenchable appetite for electrical energy in the U.S. and the world near term. One that can be reasonably expected to provide a realistic alternative to coal within a framework that MIGHT do something to slow our descent into the greenhouse gas, global warming hell.
I think you are wrong.
I think we stand a far higher chance of banning nuclear bombs than we do of shutting down coal plants.
People fear nuclear power and nuclear bombs. they do not fear coal plants.
But they really really should.
Coal plants are going to wreak far more havoc.
Whenever they talk about clean coal they only speak about from the smokestack up.
They never talk about the PROCESS of mining the coal . Thye never talk about those ash ponds dotting the landscape. They never talk about the streams being polluted and the contamanition of undergroung water supplies.
They never talk about "mountain Top removal"
GW,
You are absolutely correct. With technological investment we can limit stack emissions but what about the environmental havoc created in the primary extraction processes......? This is where the discussion should begin before we judge anything to be "clean."
Great article. I urge everyone to also read Jeff Goodell's magisterial book on the same subject:
Big Coal: Americas Dirty Little Secret on the Coal Industry.
Obama needs to stop lying about "clean coal."
Everything I've seen (and I do this for my job) suggests to me that this is, certainly, just a ploy by coal companies to keep themselves afloat for a few more years. Even if they could prove CCS viable (which is extremely unlikely, for numerous reasons - some of which were explored above) there is still the issue of having enough viable CCS sites to make a dent in our CO2 emissions. A few years worth's perhaps... but what do we do when all those caverns fill up with CO2 and we still have hundreds of coal plants? The best thing is I'm not getting my information on CCS from hippies or environmental organizations, I've gotten these issues directly from presentations at "clean" coal conferences.
Stop the coal plants now, don't listen to their propaganda and lies. There is a better way.
"Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the shadow"
The truth is that "clean coal" closed combustion is possible and perhaps even feasible assuming several generations of billions of people may benefit from it. Closed combustion is in the class of concepts generally described by the term "closed cycles", some of which are crucial to sustainable societies, e.g. closed cycles in food and material production/consumption.
BUT the geological destruction of coal mining is just not worth it. And there's no way to store "clean coal" output material to avoid the seepage of trace contaminants into the water tables. Over the millenia the fossil deposits and the trace contaminants seepage stabilized. Some water was contaminated, most was not. Some groups evolved to tolerate it, most did not because they were never exposed to it.
Putting the output materials of coal combustion back into the earth probably creates a lot more exposure to vulnerable groups that if the coal were left in the ground. And most certainly, the exposure is far greater than if we left it in the ground and focused our energy on detecting and avoiding water contaminated by all of the natural deposits of materials we were not exposed to and did not evolve to tolerate.
But even without the geological problems, this elite-driven society is nowhere near embracing the responsibility to select the energy policies and develop the conversion methods that better serve the people. So kaka on "clean coal" and the whole establishment that enables such idiotic irresponsibililty. Enlighten/empower the people to shift all production back to the local level to benefit the people.