Coming Soon To A Gas Station Near You – COAL!
There’s something that the presumptive US presidential candidates said last week that’s been a source of amusement, if not complete bewilderment, that I had to bring up on my blog.
Lately, we’ve all been feeling the squeeze – or in some cases, a head vice – each time we fill up our cars at the pump. Apparently, this hasn’t gone unnoticed by the Republican candidate, John McCain, who suggested the building of 45 new nuclear power plants and, get this, the development of technologies for using “clean coal” to reduce ‘America’s dependency of foreign oil’. Checking in on the Democratic candidate, Barack Obama, reveals that he too supports the idea of “clean coal”. Sounds to me like neither of these guys has ever been around coal since I’m sure even coal miners will agree that clean is the last thing you think about when you work with coal.
Of course, the irony in all this is that the real dependency on oil doesn’t come predominantly from its use to heat homes or run factories. It’s in our cars, it’s in the trucks and ships that transport the food, clothes and furniture we buy. It’s in the airplanes that we take for business trips or for a vacation. And the reality is that building more nuclear plants and spending decades trying to figure out how to burn coal cleanly – and good luck with that – is not going to help families and businesses absorb the escalating costs of transportation.
Besides, somehow I don’t see hybrid gas/coal SUV’s hitting the market any time soon, though I sure would be interested to see where you would throw the coal into the boiler.
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There is a big difference between minimg coal and burning coal. Mining coal is definetly messy. Burning coal can be much cleaner than you think. Especially, with new technologies to capture wasted heat and dramatically reduce pollution. But, because coal has such a bad reputation in this country we haven’t invested in any of this technology. Upping the use of coal in this country immediately would be negative, but investing in greater infrastructure to use this cheap resource more effectively is a great idea. If you want an example of effective and clean coal useage take a look at the scandinavian countries which use hydroelectric and coal for 90% of thier energy demands.
“Burning coal can be much cleaner than you think.”
Really? Then why the need to add “clean” before it? Simple – because the burning of coal is not clean. Even those coal plants which don’t actually burn the coal end up releasing millions of tons of carbon dioxide gas into the atmosphere, something I’m sure you’ve heard is a bad thing.
Regardless, your statement doesn’t really address my point here which is the creation of additional nuclear power plants and spending what undoubtedly will be billions of dollars on developing this so-called “clean coal” technology won’t resolve the issue of oil prices for consumers and businesses. If both of these candidates want to show true leadership on this issue, they need to look forward, not backwards.