Believe It Or Not - Coal Industry Touts Itself as Clean Energy

And Wants You to Subsidize It

Coal is dirty energy.  It cannot help itself, it just is.  Mining coal ruins the environment.  Burning coal ruins the air.  Disposing of coal ash ruins the ground.  But for the coal industry profits are all more important than any of that.  From the NYT.

Seeking to shore up their struggling industry, the coal producers are voicing greater concern about greenhouse gas emissions. Their goal is to frame a new image for coal as a contributor, not an obstacle, to a clean-energy future — an image intended to foster their legislative agenda.



How dumb do they think we are? Pretty dumb. Dumb enough to give them subsidies so they can carry on with their pollution.

The carbon legislation, introduced last year, would increase the federal tax credit for capture and sequestration to $50 per ton of carbon dioxide from $20. And it would expand available credits by more than a third for permanent storage for the purpose of flooding the carbon into declining oil fields to coax production. 

And it's not like clean coal technology works.

But developing commercial-scale carbon capture has been bedeviled by cost overruns and long delays. The operations not only are expensive to build but also require a lot of power, making plants less efficient. The federal government canceled one such project, called FutureGen, after it was granted more than $1 billion by the Obama administration.

So no, no, a thousand times no.  The coal folks want us to subsidize pollution.  We need to get coal out of the energy equation ASAP.