President Bush is proposing to spend $2 billion on a 10-year "clean-coal" initiative to help generate electricity without fouling the environment. But critics charge that it is just an expensive oxymoron.
"Talking about 'clean coal' is about the same as saying 'safe cigarettes,' " said David Hawkins, director of climate studies at the Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington, D.C. "It's not clean."
The dispute boils down to a clash of visions and values that may never be resolved.
The administration foresees power-generating "energy complexes" that could vary fuel inputs -- coal, natural gas and even biomass from the local garbage dump -- depending on market conditions. Bush energy planners argue that energy plants need to have the flexibility to use whatever is cheap and handy.
Such complexes would be built on a foundation of scrubbed-up technology such as coal gasification, fluidized-bed combustion and high-efficiency turbines. The idea is to get efficiency up and emissions down.
These complexes also could vary their output, producing electricity, industrial chemicals, pure hydrogen for fuel cells, transportation fuels or fertilizers, shifting from one to the other with a quick turn of the controls, all driven by market signals.
It's a concept that recognizes the fact that coal is still king when it comes to generating electricity, accounting for fully half of today's production nationwide. Although nearly everybody might prefer a nation powered by windmills and solar panels, Washington energy planners insist that isn't going to happen anytime soon.
"We need all of the resources we can get," said Robert Kripowicz, acting assistant secretary overseeing the Department of Energy's fossil fuels section.
"Renewables, fossil fuels, nuclear, energy conservation and efficiency -- you need all of those things to keep the economy going."
In this picture, the only way to protect the planet's health that also makes economic sense is to invest in cleaning up traditional power sources. It's a vision that dates to the mid-1980s, when federal grants initiated 38 clean-coal demonstration projects around the country, most of which have been completed. More grants are in the works.
Advocates say it has resulted in some dramatic improvements already. Even though the use of coal has increased by 60 percent during the past 20 years, emissions of major coal pollutants like sodium dioxide and nitrogen oxides have declined 23 percent and 12 percent, respectively.
But environmentalists see nothing but smoke and soot-covered mirrors in Bush's energy vision. "It's a boondoggle. It's corporate welfare," said Lexi Shultz, a staff attorney in the Washington office of the California Public Interest Research Group.
Investing $2 billion in "clean coal," she said, is a fraud on taxpayers that subsidizes the dirtiest bunch of polluters imaginable and takes money away from truly clean renewable-energy research.
Cleaning up coal is a good idea, but "it shouldn't be a taxpayer-supported effort," Shultz said.
Bush pledged during his 2000 campaign to support standards on four major pollutants generated by coal-burning power plants, but lately he has backed away from limits on carbon dioxide -- a critical component in global warming. None of the clean-coal technologies can get rid of carbon dioxide, even though more efficient burners reduce the amount released per megawatt of production.
"The big enchilada is carbon dioxide," Hawkins said. "That is the issue that really makes a difference in how clean coal really is, and that's the one thing Bush isn't talking about."
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