Gore: There is no such thing as 'clean coal'

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Submitted by lucidity on Thu, 12/04/2008 - 11:05am.

Think Progress:

Today, Al Gore's Alliance for Climate Protection, the League of Conservation Voters, National Wildlife Federation, Natural Resources Defense Council, and the Sierra Club launched the "Reality" Coalition, a national grassroots and advertising effort to tell a simple truth: there is no such thing as "clean coal." The coalition is arguing that coal cannot be considered clean until its carbon dioxide emissions are captured and stored, and that until coal is truly clean, there should be no new coal-fired power plants built in America.

"The coal industry has spent hundreds of millions promoting 'clean coal' technology, but in reality, there is not a single large-scale demonstration project in the United States for capturing and safely burying all of coal's CO2 emissions," Gore said. "The industry must make good its promise if they truly want to do their part to solve the climate crisis. Until that happens, coal cannot be called 'clean.'"

And the Coal Industry argument is dumbest..

#843 On Fri, 12/05/2008 8:43am UtahOwl said,

Joe Lucas, vice president for communications for the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, asserted that "clean coal" is a rational term for an evolving technology, in the same way that "medical technology"'. When the radio host challenged the statement,saying that "medical technology" makes no value judgement or implication of success as does "clean coal", Mr. Lucas ducked and wove, ending up with an analogy that, when he cleaned his room as a boy, it didn't meet his mother's definition of "clean" -i.e., "clean" is in the eye of the beholder.

It is true that a variety of technologies have been developed to curb stack emissions of acid gases, mercury and other nasty things. It is also true that the major users of coal, the electrical power industry, have had to be dragged, kicking and screaming, into into using any of these pollution controls. In the face of legal requirements to upgrade pollution controls in the construction of new power facilities, they have gamed the regs by the pretense that they were "upgrading" existing facilities. The present political powers-that-be, which are not only Republicans, have been quite happy to take money from the coal and electrical power industries in return for looking the other way. In Utah, we can confidently expect this lucrative game to continue.

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