For Whom the Black Chooster Crows

Subtitle: Ask not, schmuck

Coal-fired power plants account for roughly a third of U.S. carbon dioxide emissions (making them our single largest source of global warming pollution), the Obama Administration continues with the Clean Coal Lie as our increasingly disastrous carbon footprint pushes us past tipping point after tipping point. Instead of sand, they have their heads buried in the coal ash.

(cheesy image courtesy of YERT.com)

Biggers explains that how Chu would “save coal” is by investing billions into still infeasible, prohibitively expensive, unproven and fanciful CCS (Carbon Capture and Storage) technology. As this blog has chastened, coal won the 2008 election. Despite repeated warnings that use of coal will result in irreversible, catastrophic heating of the planet, U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu announced the Carbon Capture and Storage Simulation Initiative with an investment of up to $40 million from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

HuffPoz Jeff Biggers reports that the Secretary of Energy “emphatically took up the torch to “save coal” this week.”

Speaking on the heels of a new study about “peak coal,” agonizing testimony of coal ash debacles, reckless expansion of strip-mining from Alabama to Utah’s Bryce National Park and 20-odd states and devastating longwall mining in the American heartland, and one of the bloodiest years of coal mining in decades

More AG posts about the Clean Coal Lie

This entry was written by jcwinnie, posted on 2010-9-12 at 9:22 pm, filed under energy, policy, politics, standards and tagged coal, politics, science. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.

2 Comments

jcwinnie

Posted 2010-9-24 at 5:35 pm | Permalink

Commenting on Grist’s Glen Hurowitz post, Environmentalists Need A New President, Ross Bleakney wrote:

He prefers that they make a huge amount of noise and vote. LBJ knew this and said as much. LBJ basically said (and Obama has reiterated this) that he wants the activists to force his hand. March, write letters and keep making noise until things change. This is how things change. This is how civil rights movement was won. First came the court victories. Then, we had a friendly White House and a strong movement. They worked together. One couldn’t work without the other. If the marches had stopped because we won an election, then the legislation wouldn’t have passed. If we hadn’t won the election (imagine Nixon being elected in 1960 or Goldwater in 1964) then the marches and letters wouldn’t have mattered.

This is how things work. Don’t expect our political leaders to solve our problems. Expect them to finally go along and do the right thing, when enough pressure is placed on them.

But don’t be stupid and expect him to succumb to the pressure two months before a midterm election. Now is the time to rally, and show that 2010 was not a fluke, and that we really want to take back this country. Seriously, find an environmental organization and help out. I’m sure the Sierra Club would love your help in electing candidates. Then, after the election, write a letter to the representative or Senator and tell them what you care about, and what you did to help him or her get elected. Doing that will be much better for the country and the world that whining about how Obama doesn’t get you everything you asked for in the first 18 months of his Presidency.

Whereas this blog simply resorted to humor:

Glenn, Glenn, Glenn, what are you saying? Just when the Republicrats are getting ready to humbugger us with a bipartisan renewable energy bill.

If the Democrats can find religion to get votes, surely the Republicans can discover science. Rest assured it only will be what the big campaign contributors approve.

O.K., so Bernie will have to close his eyes and don some lead underwear… Big Deal
jcwinnie

Posted 2010-11-8 at 9:54 am | Permalink

Speaking of saving coal and not Life on the Planet as We know It, Peter Bull talked to Joshua Frank about a new investigative film.

As far as we knew, no one had done a film that really makes the connection between all of us — not just the folks in West Virginia or Kentucky — and our dependence upon this 18th-century energy resource.

I was dumbfounded to learn that in 2007 there were plans on the books for building some 160 new coal-fired power plants in the U.S. alone, and at the time we were approaching a presidential election, you couldn’t turn on the TV without seeing ads for something called “clean coal.”

On top of this, we also felt a need to do a film that not only pointed out the problem — the link between coal and climate and demystify this ‘clean coal’ stuff — but also do a film that pointed to solutions. The film version of An Inconvenient Truth had come out and was great about explaining the problem, but on solutions? Not so much. So, we embarked on a pretty ambitious attempt to cover a fair amount of ground in this film — show that coal had impacts beyond Appalachia and touched all of us; give a clear and fair assessment of the proposed technology of carbon capture and sequestration, the industry’s “clean coal” fix that would theoretically allow us to continue to burn coal but not release CO2 into the atmosphere; but also to look at the extent to which we could replace coal by increasing our energy efficiency and developing sustainable, renewable forms of energy.

2 Trackbacks

By Again – After Gutenberg on 2010-9-28 at 3:21 pm

[...] That man’s got more gumption than most of the United States Senate and the Obama Administration. [...]
By Monolayer Platinum Proton Exchange Membrane – After Gutenberg on 2010-10-17 at 3:38 pm

[...] to the clean coal lie, hydrogen, as one pundit puts it, is the the fuel of the future and always will be. In other words, [...]

After Gutenberg