The GOP Platform will declare coal to be 'clean'!!!

[LongTomH]

From Phil Plait: "Clean" Coal? Yeah, Not So Much:

If you thought the upcoming GOP national convention was going to be anything other than a look into a parallel dimension, then here’s a taste of what to expect. On Monday, the Republican National Committee had a hearing to work out the wording for the GOP platform, their list of beliefs and goals supported by the party and its members.

During these hearings, one of the topics was the use of coal. David Barton, a delegate from Texas, had an edit he wanted to make to a sentence in the platform:

I would insert the adjective “clean” along with coal particularly because [of] the technology we have now. So, “the Democrat party does not understand that coal is an abundant clean affordable reliable domestic energy resource.”

................//snip

Coal has a lot of other things in it besides carbon, including mercury, sulfur, and more. These pollutants get into the air and cause a lot of problems, including thousands of premature deaths every year. Scrubbing these toxins out of the coal is costly and very difficult, though new power plants do a better job at this than old ones.

But the elephant in the room is that carbon. Burn it and it combines with oxygen to make carbon dioxide, and this of course is a greenhouse gas. Humans put about 40 billion tons of CO2 into the air annually, far more than any natural source on the planet (including volcanoes). Because this is heating the Earth up and changing the climate, it’s important to figure out a way to capture the carbon and somehow store it to prevent it from getting into the air. This is called “carbon capture and sequestration,” or CCS.

The problem? The technology to do this doesn’t exist. Not in any real sense of the word, that is. There have been some pilot projects done, but they’ve managed only to scratch the surface in the vast amount of CO2 released.

Phil does note Barton's use of "Democrat Party," rather than Democratic:

Note Barton’s use of the phrase “Democrat party,” a term used specifically to make them sound bad. If someone uses it to start a sentence, you can be sure that the next thing they say would be useful as fertilizer.

[Statistical]

1. I would add that even scrubbers (which are never perfect) don't make coal clean.

They simply move the toxins somewhere else. So instead of heavy metals and radioactive material in the air it stays in the fly ash. Granted that is better but it doesn't magic it away. The fly ash builds up and builds up and eventually you get a flood and the dike around the fly ash pond breaks and you get this.



Coal is death. Even if CO2 wasn't an issue coal is death. Coal will always be death.