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Today is the day I die.
Stone heart, cancer deep inside.
I choke upon the lie,
gasp,
my children burned my insides.
-Olivia Harkness
Clean Coal: The Cancer Inside
In 1987, an industrial acronym, C.C.T. was coined within congress as warning bells began sounding among environmental scientists concerning the Earth’s carbon-dioxide levels rising. (1) The term, never meant for public consumption was Clean Coal Technology, and unlike the popular tag-line used as institutional advertising today, it was meant solely as a label for a group of technologies based around scrubbing filters used on coal plants. The oxymoron, quite simply an advertising slogan, later became a part of the American lexicon as coal companies later used the term to counteract the Green politics of the last decade. With the threat of solar and wind power, coal companies have attempted and have partially become successful at convincing congress, and citizens that their fuel source, coal, is the antithesis of what it really is. In 2007, the coal conglomerate spent thirty-five million dollars to clean public perception of coal’s dirty image. In essence coal executives have managed to equate hypothetical, non-existent clean technology with today’s current usage of coal. In essence, what may never actually exist is being sold to the public as “Clean Coal” when only dirty coal currently exists.
In the 1980s, a whole new lexicon was being created, like “acid rain”, and “global warming”. The primary cause of the emergence of these new scary words began as they were being associated with coal production and usage. To make matters worse by 1984 the U.S. Government allocated 42 million dollars to relocate an entire town, Centralia, Pennsylvania, in which a coal fire had occurred and continues to burn today. (2) Author David Dekok wrote in his book Fire Underground: “This is a world where no human could live.”
Yet the U.S. has nearly two-hundred-and-fifty years (240 billion tons) of coal reserves left while the world has less than fifty years of oil left. (3) However the earth’s Co2 levels are the highest in two million years, cancer is now an epidemic, and the inconvenient truth, as Al Gore may suggest, is that the world has a “fever”. The Earth, our home and planet is dying because of coal production and usage. It’s been suggested that summer artic ice will cease to exist as of 2013. (4) Combined with the byproducts of cadmium, lead, mercury and arsenic that accompany coal soot, it appears we don’t have time to wait for this elusive Clean Coal Technology.
In fact Greenpeace commissioned a report, titled “False Hope, Why Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) Won’t Save the Climate” (May 5, 2008) which projected the soonest possible deployment date of CCS technology would occur no sooner than 2030. According to the report, within three years, by 2015, the pollutants of coal could trigger unusual and unprecedented atmospheric and climatic changes. In other words, it may be too late already. Droughts, food shortages, water shortages, this is what the guise of Clean Coal has been designed to keep you from seeing.
There is however a caveat to villainizing coal, at least at the current moment; coal is a necessary evil, powering approximately 50% of the electrical grid in the United States. More importantly Clean Coal Technology, the sequestering and storing Co2 is an actually technology which coal companies have used in the past to flush out pockets of coal and it does sound reasonably viable if we could deploy it successfully the way it’s been hypothesized. The only downside is that by expending energy to re-sequester Co2 emissions into the earth, every bit of efficiency that’s been gained by more efficient burning over the last two decades is lost. In essence, by going “green” with Clean Coal, you ultimately burn more coal to reduce the pollutants. So why would we ever consider such a fallacy in logic when it comes to our energy future? The short answer is that coal companies are businesses, and investors whom love profits might enjoy an increased demand of their resource while netting marginally little benefits from Clean Coal. It provides coal companies and their stock holders an empty “good corporate citizen” image while increasing profit margins and preventing the industry from collapsing due to rival, less controversial, eco-friendly energy sources. It’s important to question the motives of an industry that runs publicity-adverts on television framing coal as “clean”, yet not one single home in the United States is powered by clean coal today and there are no clean coal plants selling electricity.
Ultimately the question comes down to capitalism. Clean Coal was coined in a world of change, born in a time of solar, and wind power. The question then became whether you continue to pursue a fuel source which is cheap, dirty, abundant and makes tons of money for not only the companies that produce coal, but industry in the United States as a whole who benefit from it to produce cheap goods, or do you choose to save civilization from itself?
My fellow Americans, people all over the world, we need to solve the climate crisis, it's not a political issue, it's a moral issue. We have everything we need to get started, with the possible exception of the will to act, that's a renewable resource, let's renew it.
-Al Gore, Academy Awards Speech (2/21/2007)
Works Cited
1. Clean Coal Technologies, Air Legislation, and National Energy Strategies. C. Lowell, Miller PHd. Washington D.C. : s.n., 1987. US Congress. pp. http://www.anl.gov/PCS/acsfuel/preprint ... 4-0003.pdf.
2. Centralia Pennsylvania. s.l. : Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia,_Pennsylvania.
3. Rudolph, John. Green : Less than 50 Years of Oil Left. s.l. : New York Times, http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/ ... sbc-warns/.
4. Amos, Johnathon. Arctic summers ice-free 'by 2013'. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7139797.stm : BBC, 2007.
