Word: coal
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...paid any attention to last year's Presidential campaign, you'll remember ads touting the benefits of "clean coal" power, sponsored by the industry group American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity. (The ads featured lumps of coal plugged into an electrical cord.) Designed in part to respond to the growing green campaign against coal power - which accounts for about 30% of U.S. carbon emissions - the ads promised high-tech and eventually carbon-free power, emphasizing coal's low cost compared to alternatives, its abundance in America and its cleanliness...
...clean coal" campaign was always more PR than reality - currently there's no economical way to capture and sequester carbon emissions from coal, and many experts doubt there ever will be. But now the idea of clean coal might be truly dead, buried beneath the 1.1 billion gallons of water mixed with toxic coal ash that on Dec. 22 burst through a dike next to the Kingston coal plant in the Tennessee Valley and blanketed several hundred acres of land, destroying nearby houses. The accident - which released 100 times more waste than the Exxon Valdez disaster - has polluted the waterways...
More than two weeks after the spill, workers and machines are still trying to clear the estimated 5.4 million cubic yards of coal ash from around the plant. The breach "is an environmental catastrophe that reveals not only the dangers of burning coal and mismanaging coal combustion waste, but also the need for federal regulation," said Steven Smith, executive director of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, at a Senate hearing on the spill on Jan. 8. After Kingston, coal may be considered many things - but it's hard to see how "clean" could be one of them...
...think the specific content mattered all that much. It would be better to do something "sensible" with the money, he wrote in the 1930s. But the economy would still be helped if government simply chose to "fill old bottles with banknotes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coal mines, which are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it to private enterprise on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again." So far, bottle-burying isn't an element of the Obama stimulus plan. But just wait till next week...
...borrowing against future user fees, like tolls on roads and higher electricity rates for more reliable and cleaner power, rather than against general government revenues. This strategy can probably cover as much as 1% of GDP per year. We can introduce new taxes on the carbon emissions from coal, oil and gas to hasten our transition to sustainable energy. For example, instead of letting gasoline prices tumble now only to see them soar again shortly, we could set a floor on prices at the pump and collect the difference between the wholesale and retail prices in federal revenues. Various carbon...