During his campaign, Obama called for clean coal technology. His website promises to “enter into public private partnerships to develop five ‘first-of-a-kind’ commercial scale coal-fired plants with clean carbon capture and sequestration technology.” But on Thursday, Al Gore tossed a bucket of cold water on so-called “clean coal.”
He launched a new coalition called the Reality Campaign, a multimillion dollar ad campaign that seeks to convince the public that clean coal—at least for now—is a myth.
Gore’s goal is to counter claims that coal companies and the US Department of Energy have made about “a new generation of energy processes that sharply reduce air emissions…from coal-burning power plants,” as the DoE puts it. Here’s a recent ad from America’s Power, a company that makes electricity from coal, that maintains clean coal technology can produce lower emissions than regular coal-burning power plants do now (which the coalition says are greater than emissions from all the cars and trucks in America):
The problem is, according to the Reality Coalition, there’s no such thing yet as “clean” coal. The coalition doesn’t exactly say there could never be a clean way of burning coal in the future. But they do say that the myth that clean coal already exists today allows companies like Clean Coal Technologies Inc. to misrepresent their plants’ impact on the environment and make a buck while doing so.
Ultimately, there might not be a major disagreement between Gore and Obama on clean coal. Obama is only for it if it can be developed, and he acknowledges it’s not here yet. The Gore campaign seems to be more concerned with now rather than later and trying to make sure that people know what Obama knows. The technology to burn coal cleanly has yet to be developed and implemented. Might Gore support clean coal technology if it ever does get off the shelf? Maybe he’ll tell us that in the next ad.
