coal

Greenwashing coal with platitudes

In the same vein as the half-pint shill with a skateboard who's "stoked" about how clean coal is, this greenwash site for Peabody Coal tries to appeal to the bumpersticker platitude crowd in its latest ad:

ENERGY FOR THE 21st CENTURY
Flip a switch.
Play a tune.
Warm your home.
Fuel your car.
Yeah ... coal can do that.

Coal gasification: “clean coal” or subsidy-hungry boondoggle?

Governing magazine has an excellent, compact overview of current developments in coal. If you're hazy on gasification this, coal-to-liquid that, and Fischer-Tropsch the other, I recommend it.

With oil and natural-gas prices rising and coal in plentiful supply, it's more or less inevitable that coal's going to get used, so it makes sense that (some) enviro organizations are biting the bullet and joining the push for the cleanest possible applications.

There is reason for cautious optimism. Coal mining is destructive as hell, but in places like northeastern Pennsylvania -- where the article focuses, and where the first U.S. coal-to-liquid plant will be built starting this Spring -- there's waste coal laying all over the place, leaching acid into groundwater (the legacy of pre-regulatory coal mining). The plant will gather that coal as feedstock and replace it with solid waste covered in soil, thereby creating farmland or forest.

Peak oil, coal, and bizarre optimism

So last week Salon ran a big story on peak oil by Katharine Mieszkowski. It was decent, though focused a bit too much on the loony fringes. I guess the temptation to do that is irresistible when trying to make a long story about the Hubbert Curve and Venezuelan oil reserves compelling.

In response, John Quiggen (at the usually excellent Crooked Timber group blog) wrote a response I can only characterize as bizarre. But the comments under the post don't treat it as bizarre. And Ezra Klein linked to it as though it proved something, and then ladled more bizarritude on top. So either these guys -- who I regard as considerably smarter than yours truly -- are missing something, or I am. Let's take a tour.

Quiggen's point, briefly, is this: Peak oilers falsely exaggerate the problem by conflating oil with fossil fuels generally, implying that running out of the former means running out of the latter. But there's actually tons and tons of coal left, and it wouldn't be too hard to do what we do with oil with coal instead. So, you know, global warming's a problem, but running out of oil isn't.

I think that's a fair summary. And I think it's nuts.

What’s really disturbing about the new coal-fired ethanol plants.

David's post about ethanol and coal inspired me to do a bit of research on just how much coal goes into producing G.W. Bush's favorite "renewable," "clean-burning" fuel source.

What I found is ... disturbing.

An excerpt from Missing Mountains, a new book about mountaintop-removal mining

Missing Mountains, Wind Publications, 220 pgs., 2005. In August of 2002, Amanda Moore, a lawyer for the Appalachian Citizens Law Center, took on what she thought was a cut-and-dried legal matter for Granville Lee Burke, a resident of Chopping Branch Hollow in eastern Kentucky. Earlier that year, a flood that wreaked havoc throughout the hollow […]

Mountaintop-removal mining is devastating Appalachia, but residents are fighting back

This article was originally published in Orion Magazine. Not since the glaciers pushed toward these ridgelines a million years ago have the Appalachian Mountains been as threatened as they are today. But the coal-extraction process decimating this landscape, known as mountaintop removal, has generated little press beyond the region. A mountaintop no more.Photo: Vivian Stockman/SouthWings.The […]

Coal companies sue feds for letting them slack on safety

After the Sago coal mine disaster killed 12 West Virginia miners last month, the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) came under widespread criticism for failing to adequately regulate the coal industry and protect mine workers. Critics blamed the Bush administration for stocking the agency with coal industry cronies who wanted a more "cooperative" approach to safety regulations rather than serious enforcement. Now, one more group has joined the chorus of MSHA critics: the very coal companies that worked to gut the agency in the first place.

Read the rest of this weird, wacky tale.

SOTU: Coal execs confused, but pleased

The lede for this Wall Street Journal story is hilarious:

Power-industry executives reacted with mild puzzlement to President Bush's proclamation that the nation needs to "invest more in zero-emission coal-fired plants" to wean itself off foreign oil. That's because oil isn't used much to make power and no one has yet developed a way to burn coal that produces no emissions.

They go on to say, of course, that they're delighted to be the recipient of a whole new bundle of subsidies. And who wouldn't be?

Climate campaigners warm to “advanced coal” and sequestration, despite Bush backing

Bush administration officials tried their darnedest to derail the international climate-change negotiations that wrapped up in Montreal last week. But in the midst of their bombastic no-no-no-ing, they did offer up one constructive idea — a $950 million partnership between the U.S. Department of Energy and industry leaders to build FutureGen, a “prototype of the […]