Fueling the American Way of Life with Clean Coal

I happened to catch an ad for something called 'clean coal' the other day, and was intrigued - make that aghast - at the suggestion that preserving the American Way of Life depends on coal. And that coal is almost, actually, positively, sort of, maybe someday will be, squeaky clean.

Can coal black really be the new green?

Apparently not quite yet. Clean coal is premised on as-yet-to-be-perfected carbon capture and storage technology, which takes all those nasty CO2 emissions and buries them, quite poetically, in played out oil and gas wells (where, hopefully, they won't do anything ugly like come belching out, creating hell-on-earth). But the development of this technology, depending on who you listen to, is either a ways off and/or will never be economically feasible.

But, let's face it, if the choice is put to us - American Way of Life vs. pumping a lot more CO2 in the atmosphere - there's probably not much of question about which choice we'll make. (You may remember how Jimmy Carter was ridiculed for suggesting we turn down our thermostats and wear a sweater around the house. No, the American Ideal is to do as Richard Nixon did at Camp David: turn up the air conditioning so you can have a big roaring fire in the fireplace in the middle of the summer. Now that's some living!)

Of course, we won't come right out and say, "I'll take 'Pollution for $100, please". We'll choose the option that says the fossil fuel problem can be fixed by American know-how, "technology", and good old capitalism (which we see breaktakingly at work in the ads for Clean Coal, don't we?).

A few things strike me here.

One is just how much the American Way of Life has become synonymous with doing-buying-consuming as if there were no tomorrow. Perhaps it has always been that way in this marvelous and brilliant land of plenty: so free, so fortunate, so rich. To suggest that our cornucopia is full at the expense of anyone or anything (e.g., the environment) else is, frankly, un-American. If they worked as hard as we did, everyone else on earth could also live in 4 bedroom-5 bath homes, with great rooms and high-ceilinged atria, a fifty mile commute away from work - but that commute's made more comfortable because we're making it in a ve-hi-cle the size of what used to be called a starter home.

Well, as it turns out, in a world of finite resources that is so dependent on fossil fuels for everything, this is not quite true.

Sure, there may be a day when technology makes it possible for us all  - and I mean everyone on earth - to live large in a way that doesn't degrade the planet. But it's not in sight quite yet.

What is in sight, though, is the end of fossil fuel.

Maybe not immediately, but, at some point...We ain't making much more of it, are we?

One time in Ireland, I was talking to a local Kerry politician about peat, which is/was the principal fuel in that country for centuries.

I asked him what Ireland was going to do when the peat ran out.

"Sure, we've plenty of it," he told me.

Sure, we've plenty of petroleum reserves, coal fields, natural gas supplies. But aren't they all going to run out sooner or later? And given that they took some millions of years to build up, what's the plan  - other than "miracle occurs here" - for when they're gone?

Meanwhile, use of these fossil fuels is undeniably - except by a few head-in-the-sand (or elsewhere) die-hards - warming up the climate.

But why worry about that?

By the time all the ice in Greenland has melted, we'll have figured out how to engineer some protective barrier and plunk it into Boston harbor so that the city (and my neighborhood) won't flood out.

Look, I hardly live some monkish life, eating root vegetables in my unheated stone cottage, drinking rain water, and making do with one change of hair shirt.

I'm your typical hypocrite: running the AC when it's too darned hot; buying all kinds of crap I don't need; watching baseball on our no-doubt-power-sucking flat screen mega-TV. I happily get on a big old, fuel guzzling plane to jet off on vacation. One bathroom? Forget about it (and there are just two of us.) "Too much" is one step more than what I and my friends have or do.

But we are all trying to do things on the margins, at least. We bring our own reusable shopping bags. We recycle. We're not so quick to nudge the thermostat in the direction of perfect comfort. We think about fuel efficiency. We turn off our glowing power strips.

Clean coal?

Not likely any time soon.

And even if we could come up with clean coal, what about those mountains in West Virginia, those rivers in Kentucky, that are completely despoiled by coal mining?

Yes, it means jobs that people are desperate for. But can't we take all that American ingenuity to come up with jobs that pay decently and don't involve cutting the peak off of a mountain and/or risking your life?

We lived in my grandmother's three-family house until I was 7. At some point Nanny converted to oil, but I remember the coal truck backing up her rocky driveway. I remember the sound of the coal rattling down the chute into the "coal bins" - one for each flat. And I remember my father shoveling coal into the furnaces on a winter day. (I also remember how much better coal was for making a snowman's eyes and mouth. Stones just were never the same.) Coal was cozy. Coal was warm. I even liked the whiff of sulphur it gave off. (And this was very clean coal - by coal standards. I was in Berlin in December 1989, and the Easties used a really rank coal that smelled terrible and turned the air brown.)

But we shouldn't be relying on "clean coal" to save the day for us.

I don't want to live in a cave, or go to bed when it gets dark since there's no unnatural light, any more than the next guy.

I just don't understand why we seem incapable of having a much-needed, serious national conversation about slowing down our over-consumption of resources, and about focusing on renewable (not depleting) sources of energy. And if we don't want to do this for altruistic, save-the-whale reasons, how about doing it defensively. Let's face it, expecting everyone else on the face of the earth to do without so that we can do more than our share of WITH, is unreasonable and just plain dangerous.

It was one thing when it wasn't in everybody's face the way it is now. But the world has made its way into some fairly primitive locations, and someone living on a slag heap in a slum may still see an occasional TV show or movie. And that someone may reasonably be asking himself why his kids are picking through trash on the slag heap while we're sending ours off to proms in 40 foot stretch Hummers.

We're an exceedingly fortunate nation, and we have done a tremendous amount of good with that fortune.

But people can and do live comfortable and full lives that don't revolve around weekly pilgrimages  to the mall so that they can stuff their Expeditions with more "stuff". (And don't forget the side trip to the town dump to unload the perfectly good "stuff" they already have so that they can make room for more.)

Clean coal?

Sure, we have plenty of reasons to want to swallow this one, but this is a lump that could cause us to choke.