The Clean Coal Con
By By Scott Edwards, Legal Director, Waterkeeper Alliance

Since 2000 the coal industry has contributed millions to political campaigns. The industry’s investments in politics have paid huge dividends. Now, under the guise of “clean coal,” all of our 2008 presidential frontrunners support subsidizing coal companies with billions of dollars in taxpayer money — corporate welfare for one of the dirtiest industries on earth. Our unbridled use of coal is killing us and our environment; coal will never be safe and it will never be clean.

The past six years of political “leadership” in the White House has wreaked unprecedented havoc on our country’s environmental health. The onslaught on our nation’s environmental laws and regulations for the greater glory (and profit) of the American energy industry has been relentless. Unfortunately, just as ecologically-minded Americans look desperately towards the 2008 presidential elections for positive changes in the environmental landscape, disturbing messages are being sent from both sides of the aisle, signals that perhaps no leading candidate is going to provide the environmental leadership that this country so urgently needs.

Over the past seven years President Bush and his Environmental Protection Agency, Department of the Interior and Mine Safety and Health Administration have given a free pass to the coal industry to ignore safety and the environment. Mines operate despite safety violations that put miners at grave risk. Federal law is twisted to allow coal companies to blow up mountains and bury streams with rubble, undercut and destroy homes and farms, and decimate our rural landscapes. Nothing stands in the way of the never-ending search for coal to burn in our nation’s 1,100 coal-burning power plants. And to preserve this legacy into the future, the Bush administration and coal companies have rallied their immense influence to promote a confused belief in “clean coal” as an acceptable and viable part of our nation’s energy future.

Despite the utopian promise of advanced technologies that scrub CO2 and other toxins out of coal smoke, coal is never clean. From cradle to grave coal devastates the environment and human health. Coal mining destroys our mountains and pollutes our precious drinking water. Transporting coal spreads toxic coal dust and produces sludge that ends up in our waterways. Mercury pouring from the smokestacks of power plants poisons our waterways and fish — EPA estimates that 410,000 newborn infants are born each year with dangerous levels of mercury in their blood. Miners and their families live in fear of mine collapses and slurry impoundment failures that can wipe out river valleys for miles, and any homes or communities in the way. And at the end of the destructive day, piles of coal combustion waste leech arsenic and selenium into our drinking water. Even if you believe that burning coal could be made clean — mining, transporting, processing and disposing of coal waste never will be.

Nor will it ever be cheap. We pay dearly for its use in so many hidden and unaccounted for ways. The ecological and human health costs — the devastation of our natural landscapes, the contamination of our water resources, the loss of our fisheries and the neurological impairment of our children — makes coal perhaps the most expensive source of energy we have.

Yet the “clean coal” con flourishes thanks to the same formula that has driven so many of the Bush administration’s other disastrous environmental policies: rhetorical sleight-of-hand, fear mongering and a false sense of patriotism. No longer do we talk about switching to renewable energy sources. Instead, our political leaders talk of developing “alternative fuels” — which include both coal and nuclear power. The new catch phrases driving this misguided shift are “energy security” or “energy independence” from foreign sources of fuel. Recent ads from Peabody Energy, the world’s largest coal corporation and one of the world’s biggest polluters, urge the public to “imagine a world where our country runs on energy from Middle America instead of the Middle East.” Corrupted public officials and the coal industry are working hand-in-hand, orchestrating a “clean coal” dog and pony show to drive corporate profits and pull the wool over the eyes of the American people.

And leaders who should know better are buying it. The frontrunners on both sides of the aisle each support handing over billions in taxpayer dollars to the coal industry. A recent article in The New York Times cites wide bipartisan support for an “energy independence” bill that will funnel billions of dollars in corporate welfare to the coal industry, touting coal as the “king of alternative fuels.” So even as we finally recognize the folly of our reliance on oil, we’re simply handing over our future to another equally dirty industry — changing our drug of choice instead of curing our addiction to harmful energy sources.

True environmental leaders recognize that it’s time to move away from destructive and inherently dirty fossil fuels like oil and coal. What we need is a strong commitment and public investment in clean, renewable energy sources. “Energy independence” should mean freedom from pollution, denuded landscapes, toxic fish, poisoned water and corporate manipulation of our nation’s energy policies. Wind, geothermal, solar — that’s where our taxpayers’ dollars should be going, not to coal. Our candidates need to wake up to the dark future that coal brings and offer real clean energy and environmental leadership. w