I Actually Have Something to Say: Clean Coal

So, I promised I had a few ideas bombin' around in my head, and this one's been out there for a while. By now, you've seen the ads about "clean coal", be they positive or negative. Now, to be up-front about all this, I have been raised for the vast majority of my life to believe that the Big Power companies, be they coal, oil, or nuclear, are usually up to something nefarious. While I might not believe that industrial lobbies such as this one are being controlled by a cartoonish Montgomery Burns style villain, I do believe that big businesses of all kinds are resistant to changes which would cause them to lose money in the short term. Thus, even if retooling power plants to run cleaner would produce more money in the long-term, I'm of the opinion that most companies are beholden to their shareholders, who are only concerned with recurring short-term gains.
I bring this up because I want my current biases to be known before I attempt even a minor investigation of the topic. So, that being said, I'll start with a basic overview of just what the hell "Clean Coal" is supposed to be.

Clean Coal is a phrase that's popped up recently as the debate over "green sources of energy" has intensified. The coal industry's claim is that they've invested billions of dollars over the past three decades in environmentally friendly advancements, resulting in a product which is ~77% cleaner as of 2005 than the product that was being sold in the 70's- with an additional six billion currently in the works across mostof the 50 states.
Assuming for a moment that the coal industry is entirely trustworthy and genuinely has our best interests at heart, there is something to be said for coal. The biggest advantage of burning this rock is that there's a whole fucking lot of it right underneath us- an estimated 170 metric gigatons in America alone. To put that number in perspective, a "gigaton" is 10 to the 9th, or one billion (1,000,000,000) tons, and there are 170 of those sitting mostly underneath Pennsylvania and other Appalachian states. Russia's right behind us with 150 gigatons, and so forth. Global reserves of coal, which are about 847 billion tons, should last about 130 years as of today's rate of use. Coal provides about 50% of our nation's power- at least as far as buildings and homes go (can't run a car off of rocks, after all, that's just silly).

Now, one of the things that caught my eye about that "77% cleaner" chart I linked above was that little snippit about how they "did not track emissions of less than 100 tons per year; all other emission figures on this table are reported in thousands of short tons". That seemed potentially dubious. Then I read the graph again-
"The calculations are based on five pollutants: carbon monoxide, volatile organic compounds, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide and particulate matter."
See anything missing?
Hint: Carbon Dioxide. CO2, the primary greenhouse gas. My thanks to the This Is Reality Blog for pointing that out, I originally missed that curious omission the first time I read the chart, probably because I saw the word "Carbon" followed by "something-Oxide".
But let's stick to the topic, here. So, focusing on the five criterea by which the coal industry judges itself, they have dropped 77% of their emissions. Great. But even so that's not all a power plant produces. I'm going to quote the Union of Concerned Scientists here, who say that the average coal plant produces, per year, 170 pounds of mercury. 1/70'th of a teaspoon -OF A TEASPOON!- of mecury can render all fish in a 25 acre lake unsafe to eat. Does anyone know the conversion of teaspoons into pounds? I don't, but thats a lot of fucking fish.
Each plant will also annually produce 225 pounds of arsenic- which will "cause cancer in one out of 100 people who drink water containing 50 parts per billion."
There are ~600 coal-burning plants in the United States today, so... well, I went into Psychology because I'm shit with numbers, but wrap your head around this for a minute. 1/70'th of a teaspoon poisons everything in a 25 acre lake, and with 170lbs per plant per year... multiplied by ~600 plants... that's about 120,000 lbs, or 47.2 tons of mercury.
This is not my amused face: >:|

I just can't get beyond the feeling that "Big Coal" is trying to hide what's really going on; attempting to take up the banner of being "clean and green" as it becomes more and more popular, in a bid to stay relevent in this dramatic new economy. Even so, saying that one has "gone green" implies that there are close to zero greenhouse emissions of any kind, and to date, there is not a single green coal plant in the nation by those standards. And even when posessing technology for scrubbers that would reduce CO2 emissions by 90%, coal companies resist on account of Costing Too Much (under "Who You Calling Cheap?")- claiming that building a 300 megawatt plant with a 90%-capture CO2 scrubber could cost 1-2.5 billion dollars.
But thats about how much normal 300 MW power plants cost!

I understand that companies need to stay afloat, expand, and make money. But at what point do we stop and say "There are more important things than netting shareholders another couple billion this year"?

Props to the following sites for information: FactCheck.org, The World Coal Institute, the This Is Reality blog, America's Power, and last but not least, WE.

Understanding the Credit Crisis

I stumbled across a really good way to put the financial meltdown into layman's terms, and it comes in the form of a video that literally draws out a step-by-step diagram of exactly what happened.


The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

My thanks to these guys for the video, and further thanks to my continuing addiction for introducing me to said blog. I think it's important that people understand just how things are imploding, and this video really makes it simple to comprehend.