Americans are waking up to the fact that clean coal is an oxymoron. It also won't remain 'cheap' for long. - Roanoke Times
It's nice to see that somebody understands this, because our politicians sure as hell don't. Aside from global warming, there's this:
More than 104,000 miners in America have died in coal mines since 1900. Twice as many have died from black lung disease. Dangerous pollutants, including mercury, filter into our air and water. The injuries and deaths caused by overburdened coal trucks are innumerable......millions of acres across 36 states have been dynamited, torn and churned into bits by strip mining in the last 150 years. More than 60 percent of all coal mined in the United States today, in fact, comes from strip mines.
...An estimated 750,000 to 1 million acres of hardwood forests, a thousand miles of waterways and more than 470 mountains and their surrounding communities -- an area the size of Delaware -- have been erased from the southeastern mountain range in the last two decades. Thousands of tons of explosives -- the equivalent of several Hiroshima atomic bombs -- are set off in Appalachian communities every year.
Also, see here about how "'Clean coal' is like a healthy cigarette...It doesn't exist."
Now, why can't our politicians figure this out? Are they stupid? Poorly advised? In the pocket of coal and other fossil fuel interests? All of the above? Next time you hear a politician - of either party, I don't care - talking about "clean coal," think about which of those possibilities is most plausible. Or just start jeering, because you know they're lying to you about so-called "clean coal."