Palin's reference to "clean coal"

Not sure which forum this should go in - Fragile Earth or Politics, but I could not believe my ears when Sarah Palin referred to "clean coal" as a greener alternative to oil.

Does she know that coal is a fossil fuel just like oil and natural gas?

Does she know that the dirtiest burning fossil fuel there is, is coal?

Does she know that one of the largest contributors to GHGs is coal-fueled power plants?

Does she have a clue?

I'm sorry, this is an absolutely astounding mistake for a candidate for the Vice-President of the United States to make. WTF???

[edit on 9-4-2008 by Valhall]

reply to post by Valhall

Yes, she DOES have a clue:
en.wikipedia.org...

Clean coal is a term used to describe methods and technologies intended to reduce the environmental impact of using coal as an energy source. These efforts can include chemically washing minerals and impurities from the coal, Gasification, treating the flue gases with steam to remove sulfur dioxide, and other proposed technologies to capture the carbon dioxide from the flue gas. The coal industry uses the term "clean coal" to describe technologies designed to enhance both the efficiency and the environmental acceptability of coal extraction, preparation and use,[1] with no specific quantitative limits on any emissions, particularly carbon dioxide.

www.sciam.com...

[edit on 4-9-2008 by ProfEmeritus]

Do you not understand that the whole concept of "clean coal" is a marketing strategy of the coal industry? Maybe not since your link of reference was wiki.

That's what I'm trying to point out, is Palin so uninformed on this matter that she's spouting a coal industry market line?

Give me a break.

reply to post by Valhall


Do you not understand that the whole concept of "clean coal" is a marketing strategy of the coal industry? Maybe not since your link of reference was wiki.

No, understand what clean coal. I linked to Wiki, so that EVERYONE could understand it. There are over a million hits on clean coal. No fuel is completely clean or completely environment-friendly. Nuclear energy leaves a byproduct that is deadly for thousands of years. Windmills produce noise polution. Geothermal Energy upsets the balance of the thernal barrier of the earth's crust. Hydro-electric interrupts nature's flow of rivers and other bodies of water. Bio-fuels upset the food chain.
The goal is to make what resources we have as clean as possible.

Exactly! You've brought home my disappointment in your post.

To promote clean coal as an alternative energy is to promote the "lessening of the greater evil". Despite what the industry wants us to believe this is just a lessening of the dirtiest burning fuel available.

And your comments of nuclear energy are spot on. We are in violent agreement! Nuclear power plants pose a much longer-term waste disposal and potential pollution problem than all 3 fossil fuels combined.

So what's my beef? What was missing, that's what. She didn't address conserving energy. She didn't address exactly what McCain has not addressed - changing our lifestyles to accomodate the future, to preserve our environment and to sanctify what we leave as our legacy and to our children.

Nope - cutting back just wasn't there, was it? Lay more pipeline, drill more wells, burn more coal (just call it clean), produce more nuclear waste...that's an appalling and disappointing energy/environmental strategy to hear in this important of a speech.

[edit on 9-4-2008 by Valhall]

To promote something that works to burn is not a bad thing unless you wish to freeze this winter.

I don't get it. There is nothing "alternative" that can replace fossil fuels now or in the near future.

We can't do nuclear, enviros scream. Can't do windmills, people don't want them around and if you put them in the desert the enviro loons won't allow power lines to get the power to the grid.

So, what would you suggest we do?

Besides Die

[edit on 4-9-2008 by infolurker]

Originally posted by infolurker


So, what would you suggest we do?

There are plenty of places that solar and wind power can be employed. So your thoughts on those alternative energy sources are off base.

But above all, a call for conservation needs to be made by the leadership of this country. We don't need leadership saying that their energy plan is to take more faster, we need them LEADING us down the adjusted path for the future.

Above all...we don't need to be burning more coal (subtitled clean or not).

Originally posted by Valhall
So what's my beef? What was missing, that's what. She didn't address conserving energy. She didn't address exactly what McCain has not addressed - changing our lifestyles to accomodate the future, to preserve our environment and to sanctify what we leave as our legacy and to our children.

Nope - cutting back just wasn't there, was it? Lay more pipeline, drill more wells, burn more coal (just call it clean), produce more nuclear waste...that's an appalling and disappointing energy/environmental strategy to hear in this important of a speech.

I think this is a sound complaint.

But to be fair, coal's future isn't necessarily all black. (Pardon the shameful pun.)

The Future of Coal

But, still, I'm rather skeptical.

In the end, an energy policy is not a good one at all if it does not include both conservation and R&D as equally important aims.

[edit on 4-9-2008 by loam]

loam,

Research "coal bed methanes" and get back with me.

To be clear, what I'm asking you to do is research that specifically (which is IN ADDITION TO the dirty burn of coal...no matter how you clean it up.)

Just look into it and get back with me.

The "clean coal" marketing strategy appears to be working.

I'll say it one more time - coal is the dirtiest fossil fuel you can burn...and CO2 at the power plant isn't all you've got to worry about.

Please understand the issue.

www.digitaljournal.com...

www.heraldextra.com...

In this year's great energy debate, Democrats describe a future when the U.S. finally embraces the anything-but-carbon avant-garde. It turns out, however, that when wind and solar power do start to come on line, they face a familiar obstacle: environmentalists and many Democrats.

…

Only last week, Duke Energy and American Electric Power announced a $1 billion joint venture to build a mere 240 miles of transmission line in Indiana necessary to accommodate new wind farms. Yet the utilities don't expect to be able to complete the lines for six long years -- until 2014, at the earliest, because of the time necessary to obtain regulatory approval and rights-of-way, plus the obligatory lawsuits.

In California, hundreds turned out at the end of July to protest a connection between the solar and geothermal fields of the Imperial Valley to Los Angeles and Orange County. The environmental class is likewise lobbying state commissioners to kill a 150-mile link between San Diego and solar panels because it would entail a 20-mile jaunt through Anza-Borrego state park. "It's kind of schizophrenic behavior," Arnold Schwarzenegger said recently. "They say that we want renewable energy, but we don't want you to put it anywhere."

California has a law mandating that utilities generate 20% of their electricity from "clean-tech" by 2010. Some 24 states have adopted a "renewable portfolio standard," while Barack Obama wants to impose a national renewable mandate. But the states, with the exception of Texas, didn't make transmission lines easier to build, though it won't prevent them from penalizing the power companies that fail to meet an impossible goal.

Texas is now the wind capital of America (though wind still generates only 3% of state electricity) because it streamlined the regulatory and legal snarls that block transmission in other states. By contrast, though Pennsylvania's Democratic Governor Ed Rendell adopted wind power as a main political plank, he and Senator Bob Casey are leading a charge to repeal a 2005 law that makes transmission lines slightly easier to build.

Wind power has also become contentious in oh-so-green Oregon, once people realized that transmission lines would cut through forests. Transmissions lines from a wind project on the Nevada-Idaho border are clogged because of possible effects on the greater sage grouse. Similar melodramas are playing out in Arizona, the Dakotas, the Carolinas, Tennessee, West Virginia, northern Maine, upstate New York, and elsewhere.

In other words, the liberal push for alternatives has the look of a huge bait-and-switch. Washington responds to the climate change panic with multibillion-dollar taxpayer subsidies for supposedly clean tech. But then when those incentives start to have an effect in the real world, the same greens who favor the subsidies say build the turbines or towers somewhere else. The only energy sources they seem to like are the ones we don't have.


So, I ask again.. while NOTHING is done to bring these "alternative" energy possibilities to reality... what do we do?

Yes... we have to use fossil fuels! Or die, or go 3rd world.

No thank you.

reply to post by Valhall


Well, the current realities of coal bed methane extraction alters the nature of this thread a bit...

But I understand what you are saying, and have no doubt that as things stand today coal and its associated technologies are ANYTHING BUT CLEAN.

But here's the rub...

Short of some other energy miracle, coal is gonna get used. I'd like to see a real commitment to mitigate the fall-out of that reality. Read the MIT study. Unless I've missed something, I don't think it's an industry propaganda piece. In fact, it leaves the impression that the goal of cleaner coal is a long shot, but nonetheless attainable with the right public policy commitments.

That's all I'm saying.


[edit on 4-9-2008 by loam]

Certainly, we should conserve. But there is just so much you can do. Besides, let's assume we conserve, and cut usage by 10-15%, a very optimistic estimate. Whatever we don't use, China and India will suck up, because there is a world-wide shortage. Since the vast majority of our oil consumption is foreign oil, conservation won't make us energy independent, and that leaves us still begging OPEC for oil, and continuing to be blackmailed by the Saudis.
Furthermore, we can't tell other countries to conserve, because they won't listen to us.

Originally posted by ProfEmeritus
Certainly, we should conserve. But there is just so much you can do. Besides, let's assume we conserve, and cut usage by 10-15%, a very optimistic estimate. Whatever we don't use, China and India will suck up,

That's a mentality that drives the "Tragedy of the Commons"...let's use it up before they do. Pathetic.

Originally posted by Valhall

That's a mentality that drives the "Tragedy of the Commons"...let's use it up before they do. Pathetic.

Coal is the most widely used source of energy.
Clean coal is better than not clean coal.
We simply can't stop burning coal unless we want to do without electricity.

So what's the problem with expanding the use of clean coal as part of the transition into more and more clean energy sources?

What would your alternative suggestion be?

Originally posted by jamie83

Coal is the most widely used source of energy.
Clean coal is better than not clean coal.
We simply can't stop burning coal unless we want to do without electricity.

So what's the problem with expanding the use of clean coal as part of the transition into more and more clean energy sources?

What would your alternative suggestion be?

I've already answered that.

That's a mentality that drives the "Tragedy of the Commons"...let's use it up before they do. Pathetic.

Do you have a problem with logic ? I NEVER said such a thing. You seem to be reading things that are not there.
The point I made was that we SHOULD conserve, if you ACTUALLY READ my posts. The problem is that conservation alone will NOT solve the problem, because we have a GLOBAL Economy, and we can't control whether others conserve. Furthermore, there are critical fuel usages that you just can't eliminate- like Agriculture and Food Production.
If you want to have a serious discussion-fine. However, if all you want to do is name call, then I will not partake of this thread anymore. You have proposed no realistic solution, just complaints about what is being done by others that are trying to SOLVE the energy crisis.

Originally posted by ProfEmeritus
Certainly, we should conserve. But there is just so much you can do. Besides, let's assume we conserve, and cut usage by 10-15%, a very optimistic estimate. Whatever we don't use, China and India will suck up, because there is a world-wide shortage. Since the vast majority of our oil consumption is foreign oil, conservation won't make us energy independent, and that leaves us still begging OPEC for oil, and continuing to be blackmailed by the Saudis.
Furthermore, we can't tell other countries to conserve, because they won't listen to us.

This is what you said. So that it's on the record for future discussions. I have no problem with logic. Do you have a problem with keeping up with your own verbage?

You said - besides even if we conserve some one else will use it up.

Oh, perish the friggin' self-centered thought. I stand by my charge against your statement - you personified what causes the Tragedy of the Commons.

We do right regardless of what others do. We don't not do right just because other's actions undo what we do. We do right...period.

Do you have a problem with ethics?

Definitions of besides -making an additional point;

That is one of the definitions, and it's the one I used. You say what you want, but YOU don't know what I wanted to say. If you can't understand my first sentence, then you do what you want.
You're the second person in a year to get my ignore button. Have a nice life.

Thank you for proving your close-mindedness. Not only in your posts, but in your ignorance...literally.

My prayer is that the rest of the nation isn't as "get all before the other guy" in their mentality as you are, else we're doomed to drag ourselves to oblivion.

You two want to get back to the topic please?

The discussion is about "clean coal" as part of an "energy plan" not each other.
.