Welcome to the Clean Coal Body Slam
I am thrilled to announce the launch of Coal-is-Dirty.com. This site was built by my company Catalyst Internet, Inc in conjunction with Junxion Strategy, Inc. for the DeSmogBlog team. It is a tool aimed at challenging the idea that coal is a viable fuel for our future energy needs.
Working with the DeSmogBlog team has been a great experience, and I have learned a lot from them about high-stakes PR, astroturfing, greenwashing and how the spin machine works. I have reposted Kevin Grandia’s launch message below. Please visit the site to see it in its entirety.
Welcome to the Clean Coal Body Slam
For too long the idea of clean coal has gone unchallenged.
A lot of people have received an email from yours truly over the last four months with the subject line: “Clean Coal Body Slam.” I thought it explained the intentions of this project very well.
Along with Greenpeace USA and Rainforest Action Network, we have pulled together some of the best and most outspoken leaders on the environmental, public health and economic effects of America’s addiction to coal, including:
Jeff Goodell, contributing editor at Rolling Stone and author of Big Coal: The Dirty Secret Behind America’s Energy Future.
Jeff Biggers, author of In the Sierra Madre and The United States of Appalachia and a regular contributor on Huffington Post.
Page van der Linden, contributing editor on Daily Kos and longtime campaigner on nuclear and coal issues.
Kert Davies, Research Director for Greenpeace in the United States and the architect for the well-known ExxonSecrets.org campaign and the recently launched StopGreenWash.org
JW Randolph, staff Legislative Associate for the powerful Appalachian Voices organization and manager of the Appalachian Voices blog.
Ted Nace, the director of Coal Swarm, a group that works to support the grassroots movement opposing coal.
David Novack, producer and director of the great new documentary, Burning the Future: Coal in America, which chronicles the environmental devastation of the coal industry in West Virginia.
Kate Rooth, who works for Greenpeace in the United States promoting climate, forests and oceans issues. She works with the Research Unit to support campaign and action work and is also a non-violence trainer.
Mark Fiore, who the Wall Street Journal recently called “the undisputed guru of the form,†creates animated political cartoons from an undisclosed location somewhere in San Francisco.
Richard Littlemore, Senior Writer for the award-winning site, DeSmogBlog.com.
These are amazing people, doing amazing work and I am very confident they will deliver the clean coal body slam so many people are looking for.
For a while now, whenever I mentioned the term “clean coal” people would roll their eyes and groan, “clean coal,” usually followed by a rolling of the eyes or a mock gagging, eyes bulging expression. Most people know coal isn’t clean, but that hasn’t stopped the coal industry from trying to convince us otherwise.
In mid-January the Washington Post ran a story about a newly launched $35 million “clean coal” campaign to be run by an organization called “Americans for Balanced Energy Choices” (ABEC). An organization run by Americans, but paid for by the coal industry.
If “clean coal” was not already engrained in the public lexicon, $35 million is sure to finish the job. The goal for ABEC, who has since changed their name to “American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity” (ACCCE), is not to make coal clean, it is to sell the idea that coal is clean.
In essence, this site exists to sell the idea that coal is dirty. Pretty easy to do when you consider the facts and clear out the rhetoric. Like the fact that mercury emissions from coal fired-power plants continues to rise and that carbon capture and storage remains an elusive pipe dream that will take another 40 years to deploy on a commercial scale.
We don’t have $35 million (not even close), but I hope this site can serve as a nexus of information for people interested in knowing the dirty facts about clean coal.
So click around, enjoy the site, check out the videos, the fact sheets and the articles.
If you’re writer, let us know if you would like to contribute. If you’re not a writer, but have a good story idea please let us know.
Drop us a line and tell us what you think of our work, sign up for our weekly e-alert and please tell everyone you know about the site.
Regards,
Kevin Grandia
Managing Editor
www.coal-is-dirty.com
September 20th, 2008
Kevin,
I am interested in your assertion that commercially available ccs technology is still 40 years out. The UofR is currently working with a private sector partner to commercialize its ccs technology in several countries worldwide. What’s the 40-year timeframe based on?
It seems to me that if we have appropriate technologies which could be applied to at least slow the rate of global warming while longer term sustainable solutions are developed and implemented we have an ethical duty to pursue those solutions.
Great site.
pc
December 14th, 2008
I don’t understand why people believe it is necessary to distort what is known about carbon capture and storage, such as what your campaign is doing. Its one thing to take a stand against the obvious excesses practiced by Big Coal as they continue to talk up CCS while refusing to do the next step, i.e. build out a number of full scale plants to finally prove out the technology, but its another to deal in distortions calculated to mislead. Why not deal in truth? Why not tell us why all you people really want to stop carbon capture? I’m having trouble figuring it out. As far as I can tell we have a global emergency over too much CO2 in the atmosphere, and keeping CO2 out of the atmosphere is the priority. A carbon tax or regulation that would stop any coal plant from emitting its carbon to the atmosphere is what is required, not convincing everyone that CCS is bogus technology. Greenpeace seems to think that a dime spent on CCS is a dime not spent on renewables - is the $50 billion Americans spend on their pets every year also $50 billion not spent on renewables? Why not campaign against that?
Goodell’s article in Rolling Stone is a case in point. He starts by saying Hansen believes “a complete phaseout of CO2 pollution from coal plants by 2030″ is necessary, and leaves out that Hansen calls for CCS. Goodell: “Perhaps some day a brilliant engineer will figure out a way to remove CO2 emissions cheaply and efficiently”, but for now all we can do is “shut them down”.
Perhaps one day Goodell will read the IPCC Special Report on Carbon Capture and Storage which states CCS is “well understood”, and “economically feasible under special conditions” right now. Special conditions mean a carbon tax or where CO2 is needed for EOR (enhanced oil recovery).
No cost figures appear in Goodell’s article, perhaps not surprisingly for someone who is proclaiming that the technology is not feasible. Goodell states CCS is “prohibitively expensive” making sure not mention IPCC, MIT, or McKinsey studies that clearly state all that is holding up implementation is the lack of a price on carbon to level the playing field between nonCCS coal fired plants and CCS ones.
The IPCC states, depending on how a CCS coal fired plant is constructed and what the exact economic conditions are where it is, CCS coal fired electricity can be expected to cost 6 - 10 cents kWh. Compare this to solar thermal which the builder of Mojave 1 says is approaching 12 cents kWh, i.e. more expensive but trending down to that.
Goodell brings up the Statoil North Sea project, and instead of remarking that this is an example of what a carbon tax can do, which all other observers I’ve ever read say, because only after Norway implemented a $50 a tonne tax did Statoil put this CCS in, all he can do is dump on it. Vaclav Smil is trotted out, he’s the guy who seems to think no one else, the IPCC, MIT, McKinsey, et. al, has ever realized that when you take a molecule of C and turn it into CO2 it increases in volume therefore, according to Smil, the task of dealing with this is not possible. Never mind the cost studies already mentioned that state that the transport and storage part of the CCS equation is the least costly part. We wouldn’t want to put a cost per tonne on transport and storage, I mean, not if we are Goodell. All we’d want to do is quote someone saying its too hard to do, pronounce its “prohibitively expensive” and move on. 3,000 km of pipelines move 50 million tonnes of CO2 annually in North America and inject it underground as part of CCS EOR (enhanced oil recovery) projects, which have operated without major concerns or incidents, so the costs are well known. Piping it costs $4 to $5 a tonne CO2 if less than 200 km, and storage costs range from -$6 to +$6 depending if someone wants to buy the CO2 for EOR. These costs, clearly, won’t be deal breakers, and Smil, however he wants to describe how much infrastructure this is, and Goodell, however much he wants to magnify the problems of CCS, aren’t going to be able to convince anyone who is not ignorant that these IPCC figures are distortions.
Goodell magnifies the risks of escaping CO2. The report that Greenpeace cherry picks for its “False Hope: Why carbon capture and storage won’t save the climate” “study” states “technical experts are confident that storage in carefully chosen and managed sites would be secure over the very long term”, but, obviously, only climate change deniers cherry pick facts out of reports to make preposterous arguments the well informed can see through in an instant. Anyone interested in my thoughts on the Greenpeace report can check DeSmogblog under one of their posts on Gore’s In reality there’s no such thing as clean coal video.
It may be that renewables will be cheaper than coal at some point in the near future, as Ausra CEO Fishman is quoted by Goodell as saying, and wouldn’t that be wonderful, but is this a reason to distort what is known about carbon capture? One very promising use for CCS is for biofuel plants that would end up as net extractors of CO2 from the atmosphere. I realize Big Coal has poisoned the atmosphere with their twenty year campaign to make sure nothing is done on climate, but I fail to see why dumping on the CCS technology, rather than calling for government to require that the coal industry implement it is the answer.