Saying it perfectly

My thoughts in another woman's mouth.

From the Nashville Tennesseean:

DON'T BE DECEIVED ON ENERGY PROMISES

By Cathie Bird -- March 3, 2008

Let's be honest: The only clean coal is the stuff that lies right where it formed, deep within protective layers of rock and soil.

Once we crack through this natural protection, whether we are extracting it, burning it, or disposing of combustion wastes, we're knee-deep in dirty coal.

The coal industry tries to hijack our common sense with promises of zero-emissions power plants that will generate safe, green byproducts — slag for construction materials, marketable sulphur, clean fuels — and capture solid and gaseous wastes such as mercury that can be buried, and carbon dioxide that can be pumped underground or into the ocean.

Be not deceived! As long as we burn coal, we will always have to deal with pollutants that must go somewhere — back into the ground, the air or the water. Methods being promoted to capture, use and store these pollutants raise the cost of production for each kilowatt astronomically.

Fortunately, recent reports have turned the lights on true costs of clean-coal technology. In 2007, 59 of 151 proposed coal-fired plants were scrubbed or failed to secure a license, and 50 others faced legal challenges. Citigroup downgraded coal stocks and advised clients to switch investments to non-coal energy. Four leading investment banks revised lending criteria for coal-fired power. This year, the U.S. Department of Energy withdrew support for FutureGen when production costs for that clean-coal prototype doubled.

Brutal methods being used

Even so, coal-fired power plants and their wastes are only the back end of the clean-coal whitewash.

Coal-extraction methods such as mountaintop removal mining are among the most brutal ever to be imposed by mankind upon the face of the Earth. Consolidated chunks of Earth's crust become movable piles of rubble, some of which is dumped into hollows, obliterating hundreds of miles of Appalachian headwaters. Poisonous metals and other pollutants bypass engineered drainage-control systems, leaching their way into groundwater.

The Sewanee coal seam in Tennessee is so toxic, for example, that there is no known technology to prevent acid mine drainage caused by disruptions of this seam. Communities of people inextricably tied to their coalfield homelands take an economic beating from dirty-coal monoculture. For many in Appalachia, the security of good health, safe homes and clean air and water has been compromised by corporate coal operations.

For all of these reasons, coal is not cheap and never will be clean.

We need to let coal-fired energy die a natural death — withdraw huge subsidies, stop blowing up mountaintops, stop building new coal plants.

Simultaneously, we need to help displaced miners and coalfield communities make the leap from coal-black to sustainable-green economies driven by proven alternative energy technologies (beware the ethanol rush!), home-based industries, infrastructure rehabilitation and restoration of watersheds damaged by mining, forestry, construction and urban sprawl.

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Cathie Bird chairs the Strip-mine Issues Committee of Save Our Cumberland Mountains.