'60 Minutes' Blows it on Coal Segment

Last night the CBS news program "60 Minutes" did a segment about so-called clean coal. Unfortunately, they missed the boat ... big time.

In their intro they said, "The future of our climate might be summed up in one question: What do we do about coal?"

The entire segment focused on whether it was possible to get carbon capture and sequestration technology (CCS) to trap CO2 gases from coal-burning power plants onto all of our coal plants in time to stave off our climate crisis. To begin with, the technology has serious problems and there is no way that it can be implemented in the time frame top scientists tell us we need to drastically reduce our CO2 emissions -- less than 10 years.

Despite all that, the basis of their segment was also flawed from the get go. Cleaning up coal is not the answer to the climate crisis. In fact, what we should be doing is getting rid of it altogether.

In the segment Jim Rogers, CEO of Duke Energy says, "We can't abandon coal. We have to find a way to keep it and use it in the future. And that means the ability to clean it up."