Dispatches this week is on the partnership that President-elect Barack Obama is seeking with the states to stimulate the economy.
Clean coal ain’t clean
Maybe you’ve seen the ads: A man playing a blue-collar worker at an energy plant talking about the wonders of clean coal, leading the viewer through the plant to the place where the magic happens. Then he opens the door onto an open field, a desolate plain, saying this is where it all happens. “Amazing,” he says, shouting over the nonexistent machinery.
The ad was produced by a new coalition — the Reality Coalition — which is advocating against the false promise of clean coal technology.
Author Jeff Biggers in The Washington Post earlier this year offered a damning assessment of the clean-coal scam:
Orwellian language has led to Orwellian politics. With the imaginary vocabulary of “clean coal,” too many Democrats and Republicans, as well as a surprising number of environmentalists, have forgotten the dirty realities of extracting coal from the earth. Pummeled by warnings that global warming is triggering the apocalypse, Americans have fallen for the ruse of futuristic science that is clean coal. And in the meantime, swaths of the country are being destroyed before our eyes.
Biggers is focusing on the tangential costs — the destruction of coal-producing areas and the people who work the mines. Extracting coal will remain a deadly pursuit, no matter what kind of technology is devised for cutting down on polluting emissions.
And that assumes that coal emissions can be cleansed. While there are some benefits to clean coal — replacing coal with something else will be difficult — the fact is “Coal is the dirtiest of all fossil fuels, and not easy to clean,” or cheap, according to Charles Q. Choi on Live Science.
“You’re taking an inherently very polluting fuel, with each pollutant
posing myriad problems, and solving each with different technologies, and that
keeps adding up in terms of cost,” Freese said.
Opponents claim — with some legitimacy — that costs could skyrocket.
It could easily increase the cost of energy from a pulverized coal plant by two-thirds to three-quarters, “way more than any of the other technologies needed to control the other pollutants,” Freese said.
In the end, the cost to the environment may just be higher than any benefit that so-called clean coal technology generates, because
“you’re depending on a nonrenewable resource for energy, and one that’s notoriously destructive on the environment when it comes to mining it out,” she added.
If carbon capture and storage do not work properly, “obviously there’s the problem of carbon dioxide leaking into the atmosphere, and that undermines the whole point of capturing it in the first place,” Freese said. “There’s also the risk that leaks from pipelines or storage facilities carrying the concentrated gas can be fatal. Dissolved carbon dioxide is also acidic, and if it migrates into groundwater supplies it can carry toxins with it, poisoning the water.”
Winds of change at the Post and Press
The newspaper business is undergoing some drastic and painful changes that are unlike almost anything its experienced in the past. Readership across the industry is down, as are ad revenues, and almost daily we hear of major layoff announcements from the major dailies and newspaper chains.
Gannett, for instance, announced earlier this week that they were slashing payroll, which comes on the heels of cuts at Newhouse’s New Jersey papers and the announcement that Newsday would be shedding staff. Staff cuts are expected to hit other outlets — and we are not immune.
Without going into details, the Princeton Packet Group has undertaken a reorganization of its news operation that will change the way we do things but not our focus on local news.
As part of this reorganization, I am relinquishing my responsibilities as managing editor of the South Brunswick Post and The Cranbury Press to become the online editor for the group. John Saccenti, who has been news editor for the past eight years will be taking charge of the paper.
For newspapers, the Web is no longer just a nice adjunct to what we do, but is fast becoming our best tool for getting information out quickly. Some publications — such as the Madison Capital-Times— have cut back from daily publication and put more resources into their Web sites.
My goal in taking over as online editor will be to bulk up our Web presence — on our new portal site, CentralJersey.com — and to take advantage of the many technological advances that have occured in recent years that have allowed readers to become citizen journalists.
I encourage readers from central New Jersey to take part in this new experiment by become active participants in what we do.
My new number is 609-924-3244, ext. 139. My e-mail — hkalet@pacpub.com — will remain the same.
On the road to Princeton: The move is complete
It is official. We have closed shop in Dayton and have moved to Princeton. We'll have more news in a while — including how to reach everyone. It's been a nice run here and I promise that we'll continue to provide a level of coverage of South Brunswick, Cranbury, Jamesburg and Monroe that I believe no one can match.
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It’s about the jobs
Do the Big Three car companies deserve a bailout? Perhaps not. But that is probably the wrong question. The question is what happens if they don’t get help — and not just to the car makers or even their employees, but to the entire economy. That’s how Josh Marshall and Matthew Yglesias frame the question, and it makes a lot of sense. Marshall makes the case that propping up the auto companies maybe no different than other ways of spending public dollars to stimulate the economy.
Whatever we think of the long-term or even the medium-term fate of the US auto industry, it’s hard to think of many other stiff accelerants to the downturn than one of more of the big automakers going bankrupt any time in the next year.
For all sorts of reasons, we couldn’t broadcast the idea that we’re just propping up these companies in the near term as a de facto stimulus effort or as a way to keep money flowing into people’s pockets (nor am I proposing that approach, as opposed to a plan which keeps them spending and employing while also laying the groundwork for longterm health). But if Krugman’s prognostications are right, it’s not clear to me that such an effort would not justify itself in macro-economic terms.
Yglesias — who links to Marshall (which is where I came across it) — adds to his point:
To me, this is by far the most persuasive case for a bailout for the car companies. If they were facing bankruptcy amidst a period of okay economic growth, I’d be strongly inclined to spend $38 billion on direct assistance to the state of Michigan and to displaced workers, feeling the best thing for the economy would be to liquidate firms that need liquidating and help people find work elsewhere. But at the moment, no matter what you did nobody could find new jobs elsewhere. Under the circumstances, giving money to GM to keep producing cars makes a certain amount of sense just as make-work. Ideally, it’d be better to employ all those people in infrastructure projects instead but the quantity of useful “ready to go” infrastructure projects is actually smaller than the volume of stimulus being contemplated, so that can’t be done on the necessary time frame.
That said, it’s important to keep in mind that there’s a tension between bailing out GM as a jobs program and bailing out GM as part of an alleged restructuring program that leads the firm to profitability. The plan GM submitted to the congress, for example, calls for both steep cuts to its workforce and for substantial union givebacks. Reduced production of vehicles is presumably part of that picture (to match reduced demand) which, in turn, means lower orders for suppliers. That’s business. But it’s not stimulus. The logic of stimulus is that we should be making the cars whether or not they can be sold at a profit just for the sake of keeping people employed.
The key piece in an auto-industry bailout, therefore, is to tie the money to maintaining jobs, along with green incentives and some other requirements. If we allow the Big Three to shed jobs and reduce production, then all we’re doing is tossing money down a rat hole, as far as the economy is concerned. We can’t climb out of a recession if no one is working.
Hank Kalet 