No Such Thing As Clean Coal

Last Updated on Sunday, 22 November 2009 17:02 Written by Shawn Dell Joyce Sunday, 22 November 2009 17:02

We are enduring a $45 million dollar advertising campaign touting “clean coal” and the solution to America’s energy crisis. This is an attempt by Big Coal lobbyists (in this case American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity) to “greenwash” Americans into believing a lie that coal can ever be clean. Don’t believe the hype!

Most of our coal is extracted through mountaintop removal mining which involves clear cutting the forests and scraping away the topsoil, blasting up to 800 feet off the top of the mountain, and gouging out the coal with gigantic earth moving machines. This mechanized process replaces human miners with technology, and causes millions of tons of “overburden” (mountaintops, trees, and topsoil) to be bulldozed into adjacent narrow valleys, and clog streams.  Just obtaining the coal is a dirty, polluting process.

Burning coal is a major contributor to climate change. Coal puts 80% more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than burning gas according to Greenpeace. Burning coal also spews pollutants like  mercury which is highly toxic and poses a ‘global environmental threat to humans and wildlife,’ according to the United Nations. Coal-fired power and heat production are the largest single source of atmospheric mercury emissions. There are no commercially available “clean coal” technologies to prevent mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants.

Even with improved filters on coal plants, which help capture some of the sulfur dioxide and mercury, the toxic waste that remains behind is a dirty problem. Coal ash is a solid byproduct of burned coal that contains significant levels of carcinogens, and arsenic that could contaminate drinking water according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

"This is hazardous waste, and it should be classified as such," says Thomas Burke, an environmental risk expert at Johns Hopkins University who has studied the health effects of coal ash. Yet it isn’t classified as hazardous waste, and through strong arming by the coal industry; remains largely unregulated.

Last December, 1.1 billion gallons of water mixed with toxic coal ash burst through a dike next to the Kingston coal plant in the Tennessee Valley and coated several hundred acres of land, and nearby houses. The coal slurry polluted the waterways of Harriman, Tennessee, leaving it a ghost town with high levels of toxins like arsenic and mercury.

The coal industry’s main strength and selling point is that coal is cheaper than renewable energy like wind, or solar because many of the costs of burning coal are hidden or externalized. These are costs that we will pay as individuals, like asthma in young children from the air pollution caused by burning coal. Climate change is another externalized cost of burning coal that is difficult to quantify. How much does the loss of a mountaintop, or Appalachian culture and community cost?

The coal industry estimates that cleaning up fly ash would cost as much as $5 billion a year. If every coal-fired plant in the U.S. added carbon capture and sequestration technology or implemented other (unproven) “clean coal” technologies, that figure could easily double. We would pay that price through higher energy costs.

Coincidentally, the EPA released a study last week claiming that it will cost Americans $22 billion, or roughly $100 per family each year, to meet the goals of the Climate Bill currently debated in the senate. We will pay either way. The big question is what we will get for our money, a transition away from fossil fuels to renewable energy or a temporary band-aid solution courtesy of Big Coal?

---Write letters to the editors of newspapers and expose the myth of clean coal.

 ---Cut your electricity consumption because most electric providers get half their power from coal.

 ---Support renewable energy by purchasing wind energy through your utility. In some areas, it would only cost $7 more per 300 kilowatt hours to get all of your energy from wind instead of polluting sources. You can sign up at www.newwindenergy.com or call your utility.

 ---Go solar and feed your excess energy back into the national grid!