mmm, coal….

someone out there has figured something out that the coal industry has not.  they’ve figured out how to effectively utilize clean coal technology (CCT).  how do i know this is true?  well, it’s pretty simple… the government’s recent subsidy for coal has reached $60 billion.

simple, right?

not if you take into account the fact that the entire coal industry is only worth about $50 billion.  wait…  is the government really subsidizing the coal industry for more then it’s worth?  i think so.  strange…

how did we get here anyway?  for starters, we began this conversation about how to wean ourselves off of foreign oil.  great conversation!  the topics were as follows:

• solar - the sun is going to run out one day, so this is not an option
• wind - lots of birds die running into those damn ugly windmills, so sorry
• water - isn’t there already worry enough about water in this world?  i mean don’t americans consume like more then 100 million bottles of water a day or something?
• cow flatulation - that’s gross
• coal - well, hell, we have lots of that!  let’s burn it!

so went the conversation into the realm of coal:  the wave of the future.  somehow these folks began talking about coal and couldn’t stop.  it’s plentiful, cheap, and we can burn it (we LOVE burning things)!  but, wait, there’s one little problem:  coal gives off LOADS of this noxious gas called carbon dioxide.  so, we have to figure out something to do with it…  by the way, while we’re trying to figure that out, let’s just keep burning it.  the atmosphere can handle it in the meantime.

so here we are.  at the center of the ven diagram trying to figure out with this cure all energy source we call coal, and someone says:  got it!  we can burn coal and it can be clean!  now, i don’t know about you, but i’ve burned coal before.  at least a few times.  and, if there’s one thing that it’s not, that is clean.  when i burn some coal for my grill or at a campfire or elsewhere it leaves massive amounts of ash all over the place.  now let’s imagine all that being pumped into the atmosphere.  mmmm, coal.

but, wait, someone just said it can be clean!  how does that work?  well, it’s pretty simple.  we just take all the carbon dioxide and pump it into a huge vacant space in the plant.  wow!  really?!?!  it’s that simple!?!? the answer is: no!

first, for this to work, each coal plant has to have a vacant space to store the gas that is roughly the size of vermont.  that’s a whole lot of space and basically means that at some point, if we transition to more coal power, nearly the entire U.S. will be sitting on gasous pouches of CO2.  second, burying stuff in the earth has worked so well with nuclear waste, why shouldn’t it work?  oh, that’s right, nuclear waste storage is a joke….  finally, the technology has to actually exist!  that’s right the technology doesn’t exist for us to have this so-called clean coal burning.

this is what perplexes me about the whole situation, and why i’m positive that someone knows something that they’re just not telling the coal industry.  althought i’m pretty sure that if clean coal were to exist, the coal industry should probably know, but that’s just me thinking again…  the government is convinced.  i supposed that means that it must be some secret CIA stuff or something.  that’s why nobody has told anybody… must be…