Daily Science Dose

How sad is it that it takes television commercials to inform the American public of, well, anything.

I have complained in the past about the Clean Coal ad campaign. So-called clean coal is not an economically viable alternative to simply allowing all kinds of bad stuff — carbon dioxide, methane, mercury, arsenic, to name a few — to enter the air we breathe. Furthermore, no one has actually built a successful large clean coal power generating plant.

Well, finally, environmental groups are entering the ad campaign game to counter the Clean Coal ad campaign. And Al Gore is putting his Nobel-prize-winning-weight behind the campaign.

A group of environmental organizations concerned about global warming, including one backed by former vice president Al Gore, is launching an advertising campaign this week to counter the coal industry’s efforts to promote what it calls “clean coal.”

The groups will spend millions of dollars on television, newspaper and outdoor ads, the first of which shows a factory door in the middle of a barren landscape and the slogan: “In reality, there is no such thing as ‘clean coal.’ ” The ads say that “there isn’t a single commercial coal power plant in America today that captures its global warming pollution.”

The campaign is a response to a $15 million-plus ad campaign that began earlier this year by the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, an industry-backed group that has tried to spruce up coal’s image. –Washington Post

Gore is super-serial about this greenwashing of the coal industry. He goes on to say that “We cannot base the strategy for human survival on the illusions of the industry that coal is already clean. It is not. What they want to do is build hundreds, if not thousands, of new coal plants on a vague promise that they might be able to retrofit those plants with a technology that does not exist.”

Of course, the Big Coal lobby’s public facade known as the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity had a response.

… Joe Lucas, vice president of the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, says that technology has helped coal plants meet environmental standards for sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide, and that it will ultimately help reduce carbon dioxide emissions too. “To use the words of a new resident of Washington, ‘Yes we can’ invest in the technologies to make us capable of storing and capturing carbon from coal plants,” Lucas said.

“Ultimately”…hmm, that’s a funny word, as it describes a time, but that time could be a long, long time away. I give the coal industry credit for trying, but to come out with an ad campaign that plainly sells lies to Americans (and to the world, ultimately)is, frankly, irresponsible.

Instead of pumping hundreds of millions of money into researching clean technology for a resource that is limited and will run out, why not invest that same money into a renewable, clean source of energy? I may be talking crazy to some shareholders of energy companies that rely on coal — which is, like, all of them — but are we as a species really that stupid to not only believe in wasting money on short-term R&D, but also to believe the Coal Industry’s lies?

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