Wonk Room’s Brad Johnson put together his own “clean coal” ad as part a terrific post first published here.
The coal industry has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to get out the message of “clean coal,” through front groups like the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, campaign contributions, and an army of lobbyists. But the devastating December 22, 2008 coal ash slurry spill of the Kingston Fossil Plant in rural Tennessee broke through the cacophony of clean coal carolers. This ThinkProgress Wonk Room video is a stark reminder that in reality, coal isn’t clean.
Watch it:
This week alone, the news of progress away from dirty coal has reached a fever pitch:
Monday: A new report shows high levels of arsenic and other toxins in rivers downstream of the Kingston coal ash spill. “TVA says no drinking water standards were violated, but tests done by the nonpartisan, nonprofit group Environmental Integrity Project say otherwise.”
A Montana electric utility decided to “scrap its plans for a $900 million coal-fired power plant east of Great Falls and turn instead to renewable energy to meet the needs of its 65,000 Montana customers.”
Tuesday: In Pettus, West Virginia, five Coal River Mountain activists were arrested and charged with trespassing after locking themselves to a bulldozer and a backhoe at a Massey Energy mountaintop-removal mine site — that could instead be a wind farm.
250 people in the towns of Prenter and Seth, West Virginia “with orange and black water in their taps, tubs and toilets are suing eight coal companies they believe poisoned their wells by pumping mine wastes into former underground mines.”
Saying, “Coal makes no sense in this day and age,” Georgia Rep. Mary Margaret Oliver (D) introduced legislation to “limit then ban” coal from mountain-top removal and “place a moratorium on new coal-plant construction in the state.”
In her State of the State address, Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm (D) called for “a near-moratorium on new coal-fired power plants and a major reduction in reliance on coal for electricity generation over the next decade.”
Green Inc.‘s Tom Zeller Jr. notes, “The coal industry — which suffers from an image problem to begin with — has had a particularly rough few days.”
Update At the Booman Tribune Steve D notes:
Unfortunately, instead of pushing for immediate help for green technologies, the Senate is looking to add in billions of boondoggle funding for “clean coal” an oxymoron if I ever heard one.
Previous in TP Climate Progress
Could be the Coalgate of the dirty business…
Three that you’ve missed.
Kentucky Utilities is paying a couple of millions in fines and mitigation projects, and forced to pay $135 million for scrubbers to clean up emissions by EPA (admittedly, they aren’t CO2 scrubbers, but it feeds into the clean coal is BS angle).
(A very sad story) China links coal use to a dramatic rise in birth defects.
And this project in NV, although it hasn’t been cancelled, it sounds like they’re not sure if they should proceed with a new regulations almost a certainty under Obama. The line I like is that they’ll use CCS when it becomes economically viable! Norway, the world’s leader in CCS, suggests that the price per ton will range from $25 to $110… Any price advantage for coal goes right out the window.
http://pepei.pennnet.com/display_article/352293/6/ARTCL/none/none/1/NV-Energy-nears-decision-on-ultra-supercritical-coal-plant/
It’s not hard-hitting enough on a gut level. Where is the photo of the two-story frame home surrounded (up to the windows) with 5 feet of black sludge?
Could also add the early TVA press releases claiming it might take 2(?) weeks to clean it all up. Or that most of the station’s boilers were shut down due to “warm weather.” (and the avalanche / washout of their railhead)
OK, granted that present coal technology is primitive, and that the “clean coal” marketing campaign appears disingenuous. So what?
Coal could be clean if particulate and SOx scrubbing could be improved, post-combustion carbon capture developed, and CO2 cracking means discovered. The DOE’s old approach of chemical carbon capture (amine scrubbing) and underground dumping (“sequestration”) of CO2 must be abandoned and prevented from soaking up all available resources for solving these big problems standing in the way of truly clean coal.
It wins the coal industry no friends when they falsely claim they have everything all figured out.
It will take a moon shot effort to do what it takes, but there is simply no alternative to coal in the near term (before 2050) for keeping the lights on. Solar and wind (combined only 1% of US power) have no storage and they are intermittent, so they cannot be used for baseload power (except for concentrating solar, which can use thermal storage). Conservation is not enough, especially where demand is growing due to water shortages. China and India need to be shown how to clean, capture, and crack their coal emissions, and that there may be a profit in the cracking products. Any other solutions?
Man… the EPA is making up for lost time. Here’s another…
http://communities.thomsonreuters.com/Carbon/209462
[JR: Can you post more on this? It is subscription.]
Here’s the press release from the EPA
http://yosemite.epa.gov/opa/admpress.nsf/names/r07_2009-2-4_clean_air_lawsuit_westar
(Sorry about the Reuters mix up… It’s free to sign up for the Carbon Community.