Clean Coal is a Lie. Environmentalists Fight Back With Cartoon

Wed, May 28, 2008

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gas mask

Ah, coal. If you live in the United States you’ve been subjected to an advertising blitz in preparation for the upcoming elections assuring you that clean coal is the answer to all of our problems. The four dollar gasoline will go away (or if you sell oil you can switch to selling liquid coal!), we’ll be able to pull out of Iraq (or commit more resources and win!), and it’s all perfectly clean. Not a single, solitary dirty thing about it.

Wait, you may ask–how does coal get clean? Doesn’t it pump billions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere every year? Why yes, yes it does. And the coal companies are planning to get rid of it all somehow. They’ll let you know. Seriously, carbon sequestration for coal won’t be ready until 2030, if there is such a thing. As you might imagine, this has raised the ire of the environmental community quite a bit, and led us to produce stuff like this:

That cartoon is really just the tip of the iceberg–an entire website, Coal-is-Dirty.com, has sprung up to combat the idea that clean coal is like anything other than “fat-free donuts.” They’ve got talent to burn–the cartoon was developed in conjunction with Mark Fiore, an award-winning political cartoonist, and we all know the coal industry isn’t going to stop giving them low-hanging fruit for subject matter.

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carbon, clean, coal, dirty, environment, politics, science, sequestration

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This post was written by:

Ben - who has written 216 posts on Environmental Graffiti.

I'm a freelance writer working in Louisville and Lexington, USA, home of fast horses, big trucks, and lots of people that deny global warming. I graduated from a small liberal arts college, and started a career in sales before thinking that it was awful, and quitting to become a writer. Get your popcorn ready...

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Mr. Sustainable Says:
May 28th, 2008 at 8:48 pm
Wow! Easily the best video on the subject I’ve seen since the Stinky Toons results!

http://www.stinkytoons.com/sgw

Thanks for sharing!
Rick S. Says:
September 5th, 2009 at 10:33 pm
“Clean Coal” is supposed to capture the carbon and pump it into high pressure repositories underground. However the coal industry has never tested their Florida facility because they demand immunity from liability law suits before doing the test. They fear that the CO2 will leak up and fill low laying area (such a basements) smothering people and they don’t want to be sued.

Furthermore a bit more than half the energy that the coal generates must be spent to trap, and compress the carbon dioxide (CO2) and pump it underground. This will double the cost of coal power and will make nuclear, solar and wind much more attractive. It would be the end of the industry so of course they talk big about “clean coal” and will do nothing as long as they can.

“Clean Coal” is an oxymoron.

Warm regards, Rick.

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