Word: coal
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...warming that during its eight-year tenure, one could have qualified as a "green progressive" simply by asserting that climate change was real. In 2007, under these circumstances - perhaps because of them - was born an unlikely alliance between Duke Energy, a North Carolina-based utility that depends heavily on coal, and the Environmental Defense Fund, which together with 30 other green groups and major corporations, formed the U.S. Climate Action Partnership (USCAP...
...that throwing money at recessions through aggressive deficit spending would resuscitate flatlined economies - and he wasn't too particular about where the money was thrown. In the depths of the Depression, he suggested that the Treasury could "fill old bottles with banknotes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coal mines" then sit back and watch a money-mining boom create jobs and prosperity. "It would, indeed, be more sensible to build houses and the like," he wrote, but "the above would be better than nothing...
...will be tempting for Obama to let Congress and the states fill the gaps with their own wish lists. But as Obama adviser Larry Summers has warned, a poorly designed stimulus "can have worse side effects than the disease that is to be cured." Handouts for clean coal, ethanol and other misguided energy technologies would be worse than inaction. With apologies to Keynes, incentives to "build houses and the like" could help inflate the same bubble that burst last year. And infrastructure spending has been one area where Congress has consistently exhibited an impressive bipartisan determination to do the wrong...
...reality, we can't really talk about clean coal - it doesn't exist. Though the coal industry is right to point out that it has improved filters on coal plants, sending less traditional pollutants like sulfur dioxide and mercury into the air, the toxic waste that remains behind is only growing. The biggest advantage of coal power has been cost - in most cases, it remains much cheaper than cleaner alternatives like wind, solar or natural gas. But the cheapness of coal depends on the fact that external costs - climate change, or the health impacts of air and water pollution from...
That's not entirely true. As we grapple with global warming, coal can be cheap or it can be (somewhat) clean. But the sea of ash in Tennessee shows it can't both, and that's a reality we need to face as we plot America's energy future...