Coal Industry Suddenly Concerned About Climate; Why, They Even Support A Carbon Tax!
And, of course, they want more government subsidies to support their amazing clean coal technology, and their affiliated unicorn factories . . .
Seeking to shore up their struggling industry, the coal producers are voicing greater concern about greenhouse gas emissions. Their goal is to frame a new image for coal as a contributor, not an obstacle, to a clean-energy future — an image intended to foster their legislative agenda. Executives of the three companies — Cloud Peak Energy, Peabody Energy and Arch Coal — are going so far as to make common cause with some of their harshest critics, including the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Clean Air Task Force. Together, they are lobbying for a tax bill to expand government subsidies to reduce the environmental impact of coal burning.
The technology they are promoting is carbon capture and sequestration — an expensive and, up to now, unwieldy method of trapping carbon dioxide emitted from coal-fired power plants before the gas can blanket the atmosphere and warm the planet.
“We can’t turn back time,” said Richard Reavey, vice president for government and public affairs at Cloud Peak Energy. “We have to accept that there are reasonable concerns about carbon dioxide and climate, and something has to be done about it. It’s a political reality, it’s a social reality, and it has to be dealt with.”
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“For 40 years, I’ve been told clean coal is right around the corner, just give us another few subsidies,” said Dan Becker, director of the Safe Climate Campaign, an environmental group. “Carbon capture and sequestration may work someday in the distant future, but right now it barely works on a technical level. It’s way far away from working on a cost-effectiveness level.”
There are only a handful of commercial-scale operations for carbon capture and sequestration globally. But coal executives say proper permitting and legal protections, along with the tax credits, could bring a surge in construction in the United States within a decade. And as the technology improves and implementation becomes less expensive, the United States could export the technology and make coal-fired power cleaner around the world.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/26/business/energy-environment/coal-industry-clean-energy.html?_r=0
