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Just days after President Bush promised to “fund new technologies that can generate coal power while capturing carbon emissions” his Department of Energy (DOE) has shut down America’s first major clean-coal project [ark | more2ark2 | search]. The experimental FutureGen project in rural Illinois was to demonstrate carbon capture and storage [search]. Just a month after it started, the DOE has pulled out of the public/private partnership. The cancellation ensures dirty coal remains the rule, and that any working and fully implemented carbon storage solution will come too late to address climate change.Clearly the Bush administration and coal industry have been stringing us along with the myth of clean coal. The coal industry's propaganda leads us to believe that no mountains are razed...

The most dangerous and pernicious lie ever to be told is that "clean coal" [search] exists as a climate mitigation strategy. There are only a handful of working efforts that sequester carbon emissions from the oil industry, which troublingly allow more oil to be retrieved. And there has been a few tentative prototype efforts to bury and store coal plant emissions, but nothing of scale or production ready. Carbon emissions may not remain in place permanently, nor be done economically.Yet on this illusory basis of untested technologies that may or may not work and companies and governments are unwilling to fund [ark], the coal industry amazingly portrays itself as green. Thus centuries of treating the atmosphere as a waste dump continues. Survival of the human species and their habitat...

Excerpts from new Earth Meanders essay: These essays have been silent on proposals for a nuclear energy [search] revival and clean coal [search] carbon sequestration as climate change solutions. I remain deeply uncertain and even ambivalent regarding their desirability and ultimate effectiveness. Nuclear and clean coal energies are the logical next technological steps in the progression of human dominance of the Earth. Yet at best they will only delay energy shortages while contributing little to climate change mitigation.Nuclear energy and clean coal may need to be pursued, but let us at least be honest regarding the full range of choices and their implications. Their pursuit may well keep the lights on for awhile longer. Yet key elements of both remain untested, it is doubtful they can...

- James Hansen, NASA’s top climatologist on Monday at the national press club. “This is a hard proposition that no politician is willing to stand up and say it’s necessary.” In case you haven’t noticed, the last couple of weeks have been a snowball of big blows for the coal industry: TXU is bought out by a group of investors, who agree to kill plans for 8 of 11 new coal-fired power plants in Texas. James Hansen, travels to Washington to call for a moratorium on building any new, conventional coal-fired plants. Texas Lawmaker, “Doc” Anderson (R-Waco) introduces legislation calling for a 180 moratorium on permitting for new coal-fired power plants. Edison Electric Institute, the utility industry’s trade association, agrees to drop its...

Elisa from the Meigs Community Action Network (MeigsCAN) occasionally sends me insights from life in the coalfields. She lives within 10 miles of 4 coal-fired power plants, 3-5 more proposed, and a mining operation that threatens to destroy her property. I wish y’all could get her messages firsthand. Here are a couple teasers: I told them they AEP has taken too much from us already in externalized costs and took pictures of emissions blowing across our soccer field giving kids respiratory issues when the nearest hospital is 45 minutes away in a county with a disproportionate number of people without health insurance, costs of damage to roads from the logging trucks coming in to clear-cut for mining and overloaded coal trucks, etc. But I also took them a great big old bag of power...

I began writing this article more than two years ago in preparation for Energy Independence Day on October 19th, 2004. I cannot think of a more appropriate time to complete it than today, four days before the largest mobilization in the history of the youth climate movement, our Week of Climate Action and just hours after the release of a new report by Greenpeace USA and other climate advocates that shows that the United States can indeed address global warming without relying on nuclear power or so-called “clean coal”. ad·dic·tion Pronunciation: &-’dik-sh&n Function: noun : compulsive physiological need for and use of a habit-forming substance (as heroin, nicotine, or alcohol) characterized by tolerance and by well-defined physiological symptoms upon...