Jan 25 2009
The Clean Coal Myth Bites the (Coal) Dust
Some of the mainstream media is finally admitting the truth. In the U.S., you can’t turn on any “news” channel without seeing the effects of the multi-million-dollar ad campaign designed to convince Americans that coal is clean and oil and gas are necessary and wonderful. It’s really beyond sickening how they are pushing this propaganda on us. In a surprise move, it’s the New York Times that contradicts one part of the clean coal/wonderful energy myth. After this excerpt from the editorial, check out the question asked by ClimateProgress on whether or not we can convince China to stop using this horrible fuel source. Coal plants are still being approved around this country too, and in order to stop them from being constructed, everyone has to act in some way. A call to your representatives in Washington is a good first step.January 23, 2009
Collapse of the Clean Coal Myth
“A month of negative news for the Tennessee Valley Authority could lead to positive changes in national policy, including federal regulation of toxic coal wastes and new legal constraints on coal-fired power plants. More broadly, the authority’s recent travails may help persuade the public that coal is nowhere near as “clean” as a high-priced industry advertising campaign makes it out to be.
In December, hundreds of acres of Roane County in eastern Tennessee were buried under a billion gallons of toxic coal sludge after the collapse of one of the T.V.A.’s containment ponds. It was an accident waiting to happen and an alarm bell for Congress and federal regulators.
Senator Barbara Boxer of California noted that coal combustion in this country produces 130 million tons of coal ash every year — enough to fill a train of boxcars stretching from Washington, D.C., to Australia. Amazingly, the task of regulating the more than 600 landfills and impoundments holding this ash is left to the states, which are more often lax than not. Ms. Boxer will press the Obama administration to devise rules for the disposal of coal ash as well as design and construction standards for the impoundments.
Just as the T.V.A. was dealing with this mess, Lacy Thornburg, a federal district judge in North Carolina, ordered the giant utility to reduce emissions from four coal-fired power plants that had been sending pollution into North Carolina. The ruling validated an unusual legal strategy adopted by North Carolina’s attorney general, Roy Cooper, who sued the T.V.A. in 2006 on grounds that pollution from its power plants in Alabama, Tennessee and Kentucky constituted a “public nuisance” to the citizens of his state. Mr. Cooper chose this route because the Bush administration had systematically weakened regulations that had been used in the past to force power companies to clean up their emissions.”
We will see more and more lawsuits soon on the issue of coal and pollution. I suspect that someone at the New York Times is sending our new president a message. I doubt they would have bothered to run an editorial like this while Bush was still in office. There would have been no point.
