Tag: environment

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.”

Every week, there is new evidence that we need to make changes in the way we live to prevent us from further polluting the skies and water.

Consider this United Nations report, which found that a “noxious cocktail of soot, smog and toxic chemicals is blotting out the sun, fouling the lungs of millions of people and altering weather patterns in large parts of Asia,” The New York Times reports.

The byproduct of automobiles, slash-and-burn agriculture, cooking on dung or wood fires and coal-fired power plants, these plumes rise over southern Africa, the Amazon basin and North America. But they are most pronounced in Asia, where so-called atmospheric brown clouds are dramatically reducing sunlight in many Chinese cities and leading to decreased crop yields in swaths of rural India, say a team of more than a dozen scientists who have been studying the problem since 2002.

“The imperative to act has never been clearer,” said Achim Steiner, executive director of the United Nations Environment Program, in Beijing, which the report identified as one of the world’s most polluted cities, and where the report was released.

While the smog may be tempering the effects of global warming, it has some deleterious effects on humans and the environment.

Rain can cleanse the skies, but some of the black grime that falls to earth ends up on the surface of the Himalayan glaciers that are the source of water for billions of people in China, India and Pakistan. As a result, the glaciers that feed into the Yangtze, Ganges, Indus and Yellow Rivers are absorbing more sunlight and melting more rapidly, researchers say.

According to the Chinese Academy of Sciences, these glaciers have shrunk by 5 percent since the 1950s and, at the current rate of retreat, could shrink by an additional 75 percent by 2050.

“We used to think of this brown cloud as a regional problem, but now we realize its impact is much greater,” said Veerabhadran Ramanathan, who led the United Nations scientific panel. “When we see the smog one day and not the next, it just means it’s blown somewhere else.”

Although the clouds’ overall impact is not entirely understood, Mr. Ramanathan, a professor of climate and ocean sciences at the University of California, San Diego, said they might be affecting precipitation in parts of India and Southeast Asia, where monsoon rainfall has been decreasing in recent decades, and central China, where devastating floods have become more frequent.

He said that some studies suggested that the plumes of soot that blot out the sun have led to a 5 percent decline in the growth rate of rice harvests across Asia since the 1960s.

For those who breathe the toxic mix, the impact can be deadly. Henning Rodhe, a professor of chemical meteorology at Stockholm University, estimates that 340,000 people in China and India die each year from cardiovascular and respiratory diseases that can be traced to the emissions from coal-burning factories, diesel trucks and wood-burning stoves. “The impacts on health alone is a reason to reduce these brown clouds,” he said.