Before yesterday’s Senate hearing on the devastating Tennessee coal plant billion-gallon ash spill, Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) demolished the “clean coal” myth. Alexander told Knoxville’s WVLT-TV:

Coal is a dirty business.

Watch it:

Cleaning up the spill is estimated to take over $250 million and at least two years, although as yet Tennessee Valley Authority CEO Ed Kilgore told senators he does not have an actual plan for the clean up. After problems for decades, including two leaks since 2003, the TVA dismissed a $25 million plan to shore up the sludge pond’s retaining walls as too expensive. Yet Kilgore testified that there were no warning signs the dike could fail:

We had no reason to believe it wouldn’t hold this. I don’t know what caused this but I don’t think it’s something that betrays the public’s trust in that we were careless.

Due to industry resistance and compliant politicians in Washington, coal ash waste is not federally regulated. Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) “plans to ask Lisa Jackson, Democratic President-elect Barack Obama’s nominee to head the EPA, about providing regulation of the ash during her confirmation hearing next week.”

The Canberra Times/AFP has the alarming news:

China is aiming to increase its coal production by about 30 per cent by 2015 to meet its energy needs, the Government has announced, in a move likely to fuel concerns over global warming.

[Note to Canberra Times: Some statements are so obvious you can skip the journalistic hedging.]

Land and Resources Ministry chief planner Hu Cunzhi said the Government planned to increase annual output to more than 3.3 billion tonnes by 2015.

That is up from the 2.54 billion tonnes produced in 2007, according to the ministry.

In short, from 2007 to 2015, China will increase its coal production by an amount equal to two-thirds of the entire coal consumption of the United States — an amount that surpasses all of the coal consumed today in Europe, Eurasia, the Middle East, Africa, and Central and South America.

Such is the legacy of 8 years of the Bush administration blocking all national and international action on climate change, and indeed actively working to undermine international negotiations by creating a parallel do-nothing track for countries like China. As Chinese officials have told me, we gave them the cover to accelerate emissions growth.

Some might claim a different president would never havebeen able to get China on a different path. But if Al Gore had been elected picked by the Supreme Court in 2000, I assert that China would not be planning for its 2015 coal production to be triple that of current U.S. coal production.

Changing China’s rapacious coal plans will arguably be Obama’s single greatest challenge in terms of preserving a livable climate and thus the health and well-being of future generations and thus any chance at a positive legacy for his presidency (see “What will make Obama a great president, Part 2: A climate deal with China”

The story continues:

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You can’t out-irony real life. The Tennessean has the story:

TVA is investigating a leak from a gypsum pond at its Widows Creek coal-burning power plant in northeastern Alabama….

Seriously, Widows Creek coal plant? What PR guy thought that up? The same genius behind Frosty the Coalman, Clean Coal Night, Deck the Halls with Clean Coal?

TVA says the leak has stopped, but not before “some materials flowed into Widows Creek.” At least they won’t have to change the creek’s name. The story continues:

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My simplest contest to date: On what day will oil prices hit $100 a barrel?

Please express your wild guess sophisticated prediction in terms of number of days from January 1, 2009.

While I know that each of you has special knowledge and expertise that allows you to make such market forecasts with startling accuracy, I’m really going for a “wisdom of crowds” thing here [yes, I know, recent events in the economy and stock market suggest the crowds don't actually have much wisdom, but stay with me on this]. So I’m planning to come up with a statistical average of all the guesses — and that can’t be done easily if you give me dates.

The winner gets a post on Climate Progress (!) — plus a figurative laurel and hardy handshake, as Mel Brooks would say.

My guess is 545 days, mid-2010 (roughly my 50th birthday — and I do mean roughly).

The price of oil has really been bouncing around in the last week. Here is some useful background from a recent Greenwire article:

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We don’t have a lot of details on the stimulus, but what is starting to come out is distinctly unimpressive on the clean energy side. Yes, it is a big deal that Obama said yesterday: “We will double the production of alternative energy in the next three years.”

But now we learn from E&E Daily (subs. req’d) that “the president-elect’s team said they were currently eyeing $10 billion worth of energy-related tax incentives in the package, out of an expected $300 billion in tax provisions in the bill overall.” No suprise, then that Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) said “Energy is way under-represented here in the package that has been discussed.”

Here is the full story:

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