Hi, JuliaBovey
AmericasPower (AmericasPower) is now following your updates on Twitter.
AmericasPower! I'm so flattered. It's only the most deceptive, sneakiest, best-funded front for the coal industry ever conceived! They sponsored half the presidential debates, have an ad on every five minutes.
These are the guys who brought us the Coal Christmas Carols - which was so stupid everyone thought their site had been hacked by The Onion.
Frosty the coal man is a jolly happy soul...
There must be magic in clean coal technology
For when they looked for pollutants
There was nearly none to see
But unfortunately, they're not usually that stupid. On the contrary, they're blindingly deceitful, charmingly insidious. Their ads feature beautiful scientists in white coats in sparkling labs swirling colored liquids in beakers - all part of the dirtiest myth alive today, "clean coal."
And these are the guys who are now following me on Twitter!
NRDC is proud to be part of Reality (www.thisisreality.org), a campaign designed to tell the truth about coal. The reality is that burning coal is the dirtiest way to make electricity and the leading cause of global warming pollution.
It is true that someday, coal-fired electricity plants will likely be able to capture and store their global warming pollution, and that's something that NRDC encourages, as long as it's done well and done honestly.
But even when coal captures and stores it's pollution - will that make coal clean? Absolutely not! Just take a look at the video I shot in Kentucky. Or meet someone with black lung. Or look at what happened to the community in Tennessee where the dammed-up swamp of filthy coal ash - what's left over when you burn it - spilled into people's homes and polluted their water. (read Frances Beinecke's post on that) Clean Coal? Just plain impossible.
]]>The excuse/reason is that Senate leadership wanted a vote lickedy split so that they could pass the bill before some numbskull could offer an amendment to ruin the fabulous, historic, bold, courageous vote on CAFE standards (see every previous post). So they voted, and the Senate Energy Bill passed.
Now, we turn our attention to the House, where if we play our cards not only right but hard and relentlessly we could get the good stuff -- the global warming and land and water protections we desperately need -- into the House version That's one of the things that's agonizing about this work. What we really want to be doing today is jumping up and down and hugging and drinking over the CAFE win. Is it HUGE. But instead we're wringing our hands about how the bill lacks other things that are very important to us.
Many people -- including the grumpy but excellent Wall Street Journal energy reporter John Fialka -- say that the problem with us environmentalists is that we "make the perfect the enemy of the good." Not only that, but it seems that wins and losses happen to us simultaneously, so that we're forced to be thrilled about one thing at the same moment that we'e bitterly disappointed about something else. We want to have a clear message. But how can you be clear when you're basically schizophrenic?
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