If Democratic candidates ran on progressive ideas on a consistent basis...

[MADem]

23. From one of the sources on your very list, there.... (uh oh...)

It's not a myth. It's apparently a pricey methodology:

That October, Mountaineer began a pioneering experiment in carbon capture. Powell oversaw it. His father had worked for three decades at a coal-fired power plant in Virginia; Powell himself had spent his career at Mountaineer. The job was simple, he said: “We burn coal, make steam, and run turbines.” During the experiment, though, it got a bit more complicated. AEP attached a chemical plant to the back of its power plant. It chilled about 1.5 percent of Mountaineer’s smoke and diverted it through a solution of ammonium carbonate, which absorbed the CO₂. The CO₂ was then drastically compressed and injected into a porous sandstone formation more than a mile below the banks of the Ohio.

The system worked. Over the next two years AEP captured and stored more than 37,000 metric tons of pure carbon dioxide. The CO₂ is still underground, not in the atmosphere. It was only a quarter of one percent of the gas coming out the stack, but that was supposed to be just the beginning. AEP planned to scale up the project to capture a quarter of the plant’s emissions, or 1.5 million tons of CO₂ a year. The company had agreed to invest $334 million, and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) had agreed to match that. But the deal depended on AEP being able to recoup its investment. And after climate change legislation collapsed in the Senate, state utility regulators told the company that it could not charge its customers for a technology not yet required by law.

In the spring of 2011 AEP ended the project. The maze of pipes and pumps and tanks was dismantled. Though small, the Mountaineer system had been the world’s first to capture and store carbon dioxide directly from a coal-fired electric plant, and it had attracted hundreds of curious visitors from around the world, including China and India. “The process did work, and we educated a lot of people,” said Powell. “But geez-oh-whiz—it’s going to take another breakthrough to make it worth our while.” A regulatory breakthrough above all—such as the one Obama promised last summer—but technical ones would help too.

Capturing carbon dioxide and storing or “sequestering” it underground in porous rock formations sounds to its critics like a techno-fix fantasy. But DOE has spent some $6.5 billion over the past three decades researching and testing the technology. And for more than four decades the oil industry has been injecting compressed carbon dioxide into depleted oil fields, using it to coax trapped oil to the surface. On the Canadian Great Plains this practice has been turned into one of the world’s largest underground carbon-storage operations.....

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2014/04/coal/nijhuis-text

Another of the sources in your list is the American Coal Council--you can have a look there, yourself. They say clean coal is NOT a myth.

And someone better tell the DOE (also on your list): http://www.fe.doe.gov/education/energylessons/coal/coal_cct2.html

You probably want to read the cites before you hand over a blanket google.

I don't disagree that "clean" coal isn't entirely clean, but there are ways to make it "cleaner" like capturing methods and sulphur washing and things like that. The real question is this, over the long term--do people want to invest in those technologies, which are expensive, or just get off their asses and transition to solar and wind and even wave technology? I'm in favor of the latter, but I am not from KY, either, and I understand that all politics is local.