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TechnoratiCoal Industry Tries to Hide Dirty Facts Behind 'Clean' Claims
Misleading and duplicitous ads on 'clean coal' cannot camouflage the stench of fossil fuels
The fightback begins here. Well, we can hope. The misleading and downright duplicitous ads against clean coal chronicled here are now being contested by - you guessed it - an ad.
![[Greenpeace activists disrupt coal loading at the world's largest coal port at Newcastle, Australia (Photograph: EPA)]](http://www.commondreams.org/files/article_images/Greenpace-activists-disru-002_0.jpg "Greenpace-activists-disru-002.jpg")
Last week the Academy-award winning movie producers Joel and Ethan Coen began airing their commercial on cable TV in the US.
It is a spoof air freshener advert with a suburban housewife spraying
her home with a coal-black aerosol from a can called Clean Coal.
Explaining the magic ingredient, the presenter says that "Clean Coal
harnesses the awesome power of the word clean".
It ends with the caption for anyone with a comedy bypass: "In reality, there is no such thing as clean coal."
Meanwhile, a thick spray of the white stuff in Washington DC couldn't prevent some 2,000 protesters gathering at the Capitol Hill power plant to protest that the plant burns coal to provide steam heating for the federal legislature's cavernous halls.
The snow did allow a mocking Fox News to report that the scene was "reminiscent of a day in January 2004 when Al Gore made a major address in New York - on one of the coldest days in the city's history." They really can't get over Gore, can they?
But we all have our obsessions, and I fear that the alliterative power of "clean coal" is destined to reoccur in this column. It is just so pervasive and so toxic. It seems capable of camouflaging every stench of the industry. And even the distant prospect of it is just so damned convenient for politicians caught between coal and environment lobbies.
In Britain, the prospective "clean coal" technology known as carbon capture and storage looks like it is being lined up as a fig leaf for the construction of new coal-burning power plants. How else can one explain contradictory messages from ministers in recent days?
This week the word from Whitehall has been that a decision on the Kingsnorth power plant, likely to be the first of several such plants, had been delayed until the autumn, while the cabinet minister responsible for both energy and climate policy, Ed Miliband, conducted a review of coal policy because of climate concerns.
But I am having trouble reconciling that with last week's speech by energy minister Mike O'Brien at a coal industry conference in London where he said "we will need new fossil fuel plants, including coal" to meet a "generation capacity gap by 2015".
Which is it to be? Watch out for "clean coal" to bridge the climate gap. But we may be asked to glossed over the fact that, as O'Brien helpfully explained, Britain's first project to see if it can make the technology work at an actual power station won't begin its first tests until 2014 - a bit late to plug an energy gap a year later.
The doublespeak is in overdrive right now in Australia, from where reader Patrick has sent me updates on the launch of the Australian Coal Association PR campaign New Generation Coal. It has a multi-million dollar media budget for promoting clean coal.
We should be grateful that, like its counterparts round the world, the ACA now concedes that climate change has to be beaten. And unlike many countries, the Australian $40-billion coal industry is spending a few tens of millions of dollars a year on R&D into carbon capture and storage.
But it is small stuff that they are selling big. And one snappily-titled project, Zero-Gen in Queensland, is reportedly on the brink of collapse because of a funding dispute between industry and government.
The Australian industry's claim that carbon capture and storage will be "commercially viable by 2017" is far-fetched to say the least.
Nobody else in the world thinks that is possible. And that, I'd guess, includes the Australian government, which recently snubbed UN climate negotiators by setting itself a derisory target of reducing domestic CO2 emissions by just 5% by 2020.
Australia is built on coal. It gets 80% of its electricity from burning the stuff. But domestic emissions are just the start. It is also the world's largest exporter. As another reader Dave points out, Newcastle in New South Wales is the world's busiest coal exporting terminal, sending abroad 80 million tonnes of the black stuff every year, mostly to fast-growing Asian economies like China and Thailand.
So not only are Aussie greenhouse gas emissions among the world's highest (per head of population, more than twice those of Britain) they are also doing their best to bump everybody's up as well.
Until its Labor prime minister, Kevin Rudd, starts doing something about that, his claimed green credentials will be just greenwash.
12 Comments so far
Show AllBy all intelligent assessments, it is pretty obvious that we are at a critical point in taking on our responsibilities as evolving humans, who are beginning to realize our impact and responsibilities, to insure the survival of ourselves and the rest of the biosphere. I think that it is time to listen to the visionaries and geniuses that have pointed the way to our awakening. I think we need to wake up and listen to the forefront of scientific discoveries to adapt and innovate our way out of the current multiple crises. To claim that pumping 10's of billions of tons of CO2 per year into an equilibrium system will not have a profound effect on the climate is really pretty astounding in itself. Now if we can just use that force of belief to turn toward areas of discovery maybe we'll get somewhere, eh? Being in denial is the first step to failure, and being blind-sided. Of course, one can then further deny what caused the failures or catastrophies. Just listen to, say, Rush Limbaugh, as a good example of the archetype of denial and obfuscation.
The correct way to heat the US Capitol building is to utilize the waste heat from the electricity generation which should be solar-fired, not coal-fired. Fossil advocates like to claim that solar energy isn't available round the clock. But this is a bogus claim. First, the Capitol uses very little electricity at night, like most buildings. Second, 24-hour thermal stores that enable "baseline" generation are cheap. Third, we can allow a wee bit of supplemental combustion heat when needed. Peabody Coal, Inc. ought to be groveling for this wee tiny market for supplemental energy instead of force-feeding us coal for ALL of our energy. We should shrink the gorilla down small enough to drown it in a bathtub. Global Warming is the work of a handful of capitalist gorillas like Peabody Coal.
As President Obama said a while ago, we had the technology, starting from zero
to send men to the moon in ten yrs. We have the technology now to create clean
coal. I live about 40 miles from a Xcell electric power plant. The coal burned in that plant comes mostly from Wyoming. The emmisions from that plant are cleaner than the emmisions coming from the cars going by on the highway.
In that case, you should fish near it and have no fear of the mercury that's in every fish in Florida from coal plant emissions (there have been state health department warnings against eating freshwater fish caught in Florida waters for years, if not decades because of this). Enjoy!
it is all about money, the coal producers think coal is a green technology. lets ask the coal miners with all of their illnesses.
"Clean Coal" is like saying "clean poison"
After you "capture" the carbon, what do you do with it then? Can it be used to make carbon fibers, automobile tires, pencil leads, etc..., or do we need to bury it out in Nevada, next to the nukes, or use the traditional "just dump it in the ocean, like always" routine?
As I understand it, the plan is to chill and liquify the CO2, then pump it through pipelines to played out natual gas wells, where the CO2 will then be pumped underground, out of sight, out of mind.
But what happens if the pipeline ruptures?
For an idea, hunt down the details of a lake in Africe that periodicly belches out tons of CO2 gas, which, being heavie than air, flows along the ground, suffocating animals, livestock and humans alike. The last time it did this was in the early 90's (if I am remembering correctly). Some thing on the order of 10000 cattle and 2-3000 people died...
Would you want this running through your state?
Walk in peace.
Why not send the chilled CO2 to the arctic/antarctic to prevent the ice in the polar caps from melting? Isn't that what dry ice is? Then the coal industry could have a new slogan, "The more coal we burn, the better it is for the planet!". See...I knew technology could solve everything.
That reminds me of something from, the Simpsons, I think. The solution to global warming was to put an ever-larger ice cube into the ocean year after year.
Just don't ever put your tongue against it!
The question is more 'what happens if the played out natural gas well ruptures?' The pipline is only for delivering it underground. They're talking about simply injecting this stuff into the earth.... no man made container of any kind (not that I'd want one either).
But, recent discoveries are showing that underground water does not flow in single isolated underground streams. Rather, underground water behaves like thousands of branches of a tree, networking, interconnecting, and branching out across a region.
Now who wants to put coal sludge next to your underground water supply?