Clean Coal

For politically progressive types, “clean coal” is an outrage, and is fairly criticized as a greenwashing technique designed to prolong the life of an energy technology that, in a post-carbon future, should be on its last legs. Shouting repeatedly “no clean coal” is something that needs to be done but isn’t the entire answer to making coal go away. Reversing fossil fuel consumption won’t happen overnight even with heroic efforts, and the danger of dismissing the issue with “no such thing as clean coal” is that it cedes the topic to the utilities and mining industries, permitting them to frame the terms of the discussion.

Which they’ve done. “Clean coal” proponents seem to have successfully framed the topic only in terms of carbon dioxide emissions and climate change, deflecting attention from mountaintop removal, New Source Performance Standards, worker health and safety, management of coal combustion wastes and environmental justice, while progressives squabble about whether toxic metals or radionuclides are the bigger risk resulting from the Kingston Fossil retention basin failure.

The right answer is probably “neither”, However, it scarcely matters that the several feet of crud deposited on your front porch or running off into nearby streams is not dangerously toxic, though part of EPA’s handwringing since 1993 about regulating disposal of coal combustion wastes is whether or not to list them as hazardous wastes. Beyond the outrage about Kingston Fossil happening at all or the lackluster media response, this could provide an opportunity. If the utility and mining industries have embraced “clean coal”, don’t dismiss it, rather wrap it around their necks like an anchor. Make it a dialog that includes restoration and management of runoff during mining, protecting the workers, sustaining the communities that are home to coal mining, retrofitting plants with emissions controls for particulates and mercury, reusing rather than landfilling coal combustion wastes – as well as sequestering the carbon dioxide emissions. If the proponents really believe in “clean coal”, then let them stand behind it with dollars and the willingness to submit to regulation for all of coal’s environmental and health problems.

Of course, these changes will make electrical power from coal less affordable, and make utility company stock less desirable to shareholders. Maybe that will give alternatives such renewable energy and conservation more of an edge in the energy marketplace.

Adult Supervision

I've been looking around for some different blogs to read, because if I'm going to waste my time I at least want to be entertained, and I have developed a very low tolerance for earnest progressive chest-beating. Barack Obama inviting homophobic pastor Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at the inauguration isn't something to get the vapors over, as the time for that is if the policies aren't getting us out the very deep hole Republicans everywhere have dug for us.

Who is IOZ ruminated on another blogger's ruminations about Star Trek, and it's overall spirit of optimism and human endeavor, so reminiscent of JFK at least while Gene Roddenberry was running things. Later on, though, TNG and DS9 would get pretty grim and militaristic. Recalling how Kirk said to Trelaine, the immortal, godlike six-year-old how he was missing out on "the terror of murder, the suspense - the fun",** I guess the producers just couldn't hold out, giving in to the notion that watching shit get blown up was more fun than optimism and human endeavor.

IOZ skewers the fatuousness that would infect particularly the later Star Trek programs, saying,

You'll often hear the claim that Star Trek posits an ideal of a cooperative, post-scarcity, universally tolerant and largely utopic future, when in fact its fictive universe presents a deracinated, militaristic hierarchy as humanity's destiny. Which, when you think about it, is Kennedy-esque, isn't it? Star Trek was mostly zippity-doo space opera, and I feel a little guilty for picking on its tissue-paper politics, but you do have to wonder why enlightened humanity chooses to whisk among the stars in a bad facsimile of a 19th-century navy? In that regard, the missing detail is a realistic portrayal of sodomy.

In that same vein, other missing details in a realistic portrayal of a 19th-century navy were rum and the lash.

While it's nice to speculate about the hope of a post-scarcity utopia, we're going to have to get through the scarcity phase, which we're beginning to make the transition into. This brings me back to President-elect Obama selecting a homophobic bigot as the pastor to deliver the invocation at his inauguration. I find it deplorable, but in a tiresome sort of way because it distracts progressives whose energies should be devoted to other areas such as, say our unsustainable way of life, a topic that is relentlessly ignored by the media. Unfortunately, we as progressives are going to have to be the adults here (since the Rick Warrens of the world apparently aren't enlightened enough for that yet), which means sometimes sucking it in for certain aspects of life such as, say a finger stuck in the eye of homosexuals everywhere, to focus on bigger picture stuff. . . such as, say our unsustainable way of life. Being dead from starvation, disease or conflict makes it harder in the long run to combat hate and bigotry.

Therefore, I'm much more impressed with President-elect Obama appointing Jane Lubchenco as administrator of NOAA, than I am discomfited by selecting the Purpose-Driven-Life guy to deliver the invocation at his inauguration. Very adult-like.

** And if that just went past you, you need to question how much of a Trekkie you really are.