Creating a 'Pollution Casino': Why the Energy Bill May End Up a Boon for Our Dirtiest Industries

By Dara Colwell, AlterNet. Posted June 24, 2009.

Or solid action -- like cutting emissions. Today.

"There's a big disconnect between what Washington is producing and what science demands," says Nick Berning, spokesman for environmental advocacy group Friends of the Earth, which does not support the bill due to its "unambitious short-term targets." While the international community is calling for cuts in carbon emissions 25-40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020, Waxman-Markey aims for a mere 4 percent. "Global warming cannot be reversed -- it's not the type of issue you can take one shot at it with a weak bill. The time to act is now, but this bill undermines emission reductions by giving bailouts to polluters."

Particularly worrying, says Berning, is the coal industry's support for this bill, "a sign there are significant problems." The bill focuses on investing in a renewable energy standard that requires 6 percent of electricity to come from renewable fuels by 2012, and includes carbon capture and storage incentives, also known as CCS, which seek to curb fossil-fuel emissions by storing CO2 underground.

Many environmentalists contend coal should not be considered a source of renewable energy. Coal emits 40 percent of America's carbon dioxide emissions -- roughly the same emissions from cars, trucks, busses, trains, planes and boats combined, according to the "Coal is Dirty" Web site, a project managed by Rainforest Action Network and Greenpeace USA.

Coal (and CCS) figure largely in the bill because coal is a plentiful, cheap form of energy that currently fuels half of America's power grid. If we stopped burning coal tomorrow, the economy would simply collapse. But not just America is dependent on coal -- the world is. Coal accounts for roughly 70 percent of China's energy supply, and China is now producing coal-fired power plants like Detroit once produced cars to meet its burgeoning energy needs.

Coal may be cheap, but it's also the dirtiest fossil fuel on the planet. "Clean coal is like a healthy cigarette," says attorney Blan Holman on Thisisreality.org's Web site, a project of the Sierra Club and the National Resources Defense Council, among others. Coal burning is a leading source of mercury contamination, and its combustion releases dioxide, hydrochloric and sulfuric acid, ammonia, arsenic and lead, for starters, killing 24,000 people prematurely a year, according to the American Lung Association. Then there's the extensive damage mining does to landscapes, water supplies and ecosystems.

One of coal's byproducts is coal ash, of which roughly 130 millions tons is produced each year. Coal ash is so toxic, the Department of Homeland Security considers it a security risk and won't allow Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., who chairs the Senate's Environment and Public Works committee, to reveal 44 dump sites the Environmental Protection Agency deems highly hazardous. (For a longer look at coal ash, this month's GQ contains an article about Tennessee's Kinston power plant, which experienced a spill last December 100 times larger than the Exxon Valdez's.)

In February, NASA climatologist James Hansen was quoted in the U.K. Guardian, saying, "The dirtiest trick governments play on their citizens in the pretense that they are working on 'clean coal.' ... The trains carrying coal to power plants are death trains. Coal-fired plants are factories of death."

Only, coal isn't going away. The government, backed by the coal industry, which insists coal is a reliable, long-term energy solution, is charging ahead funding so-called clean coal projects.

On June 12, the Obama administration kick-started FutureGen, an ill-fated project scrapped by the Bush administration for being too expensive, to construct the country's first so-called clean coal power project to the tune of $1 billion. Much focus will be on CCS, or sequestering carbon, which is still largely a theoretical approach to capturing and storing CO2.

"Coal is carbon that is already sequestered -- let's find a way to leave it in the ground," says Berning.

"CCS is not a real solution It's not deployable and keeps reliance on the dirtiest fuel known to man," says Daniel Kessler, spokesman for Greenpeace, who likens CCS to an old model of dealing with pollution -- sticking it in a hole in the ground. "We are facing unprecedented crisis, and all our resources need to be marshaled to finding real solutions."

According to Jeff Brehm, marketing communications leader at the Electric Power Research Institute, a nonprofit that researches issues of interest to the electric power industry, CCS research "is just getting started" when it comes to putting carbon underground. CCS has been done before, he says, but it hasn't been done long-term, nor on a large scale, and employing CCS technology involves further issues, such as capturing and compressing carbon, which requires an increased energy load -- up to 30 percent more. This means burning more coal.

Or there's storage. CCS works by injecting carbon into underground geological formations, but according to Brehm, geological studies show that California, for example, doesn't have the right geological features for storage. That means having to ship captured carbon to another state, which then creates multistate jurisdictional issues, such as who is liable if the gas leaks?

See more stories tagged with: energy, global warming, climate change, coal, waxman-markey, climate bill, climate legislation, aces

Dara Colwell is a freelance writer based in San Francisco.

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