Coal industry tries to hide dirty facts behind 'clean' claims

Misleading and duplicitous ads on 'clean coal' cannot camouflage the stench of fossil fuels

Fred Pearce
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 5 March 2009 11.29 GMT

The fightback begins here. Well, we can hope. The misleading and downright duplicitous ads against clean coal chronicled here are now being contested by – you guessed it – an ad.
Last week the Academy-award winning movie producers Joel and Ethan Coen began airing their commercial on cable TV in the US. It is a spoof air freshener advert with a suburban housewife spraying her home with a coal-black aerosol from a can called Clean Coal. Explaining the magic ingredient, the presenter says that "Clean Coal harnesses the awesome power of the word clean".
It ends with the caption for anyone with a comedy bypass: "In reality, there is no such thing as clean coal."
Meanwhile, a thick spray of the white stuff in Washington DC couldn't prevent some 2,000 protesters gathering at the Capitol Hill power plant to protest that the plant burns coal to provide steam heating for the federal legislature's cavernous halls.
The snow did allow a mocking Fox News to report that the scene was "reminiscent of a day in January 2004 when Al Gore made a major address in New York – on one of the coldest days in the city's history." They really can't get over Gore, can they?
But we all have our obsessions, and I fear that the alliterative power of "clean coal" is destined to reoccur in this column. It is just so pervasive and so toxic. It seems capable of camouflaging every stench of the industry. And even the distant prospect of it is just so damned convenient for politicians caught between coal and environment lobbies.
In Britain, the prospective "clean coal" technology known as carbon capture and storage looks like it is being lined up as a fig leaf for the construction of new coal-burning power plants. How else can one explain contradictory messages from ministers in recent days?
This week the word from Whitehall has been that a decision on the Kingsnorth power plant, likely to be the first of several such plants, had been delayed until the autumn, while the cabinet minister responsible for both energy and climate policy, Ed Miliband, conducted a review of coal policy because of climate concerns.
But I am having trouble reconciling that with last week's speech by energy minister Mike O'Brien at a coal industry conference in London where he said "we will need new fossil fuel plants, including coal" to meet a "generation capacity gap by 2015".
Which is it to be? Watch out for "clean coal" to bridge the climate gap. But we may be asked to glossed over the fact that, as O'Brien helpfully explained, Britain's first project to see if it can make the technology work at an actual power station won't begin its first tests until 2014 – a bit late to plug an energy gap a year later.
The doublespeak is in overdrive right now in Australia, from where reader Patrick has sent me updates on the launch of the Australian Coal Association PR campaign New Generation Coal. It has a multi-million dollar media budget for promoting clean coal.
We should be grateful that, like its counterparts round the world, the ACA now concedes that climate change has to be beaten. And unlike many countries, the Australian $40-billion coal industry is spending a few tens of millions of dollars a year on R&D into carbon capture and storage.
But it is small stuff that they are selling big. And one snappily-titled project, Zero-Gen in Queensland, is reportedly on the brink of collapse because of a funding dispute between industry and government.
The Australian industry's claim that carbon capture and storage will be "commercially viable by 2017" is far-fetched to say the least.
Nobody else in the world thinks that is possible. And that, I'd guess, includes the Australian government, which recently snubbed UN climate negotiators by setting itself a derisory target of reducing domestic CO2 emissions by just 5% by 2020.
Australia is built on coal. It gets 80% of its electricity from burning the stuff. But domestic emissions are just the start. It is also the world's largest exporter. As another reader Dave points out, Newcastle in New South Wales is the world's busiest coal exporting terminal, sending abroad 80 million tonnes of the black stuff every year, mostly to fast-growing Asian economies like China and Thailand.
So not only are Aussie greenhouse gas emissions among the world's highest (per head of population, more than twice those of Britain) they are also doing their best to bump everybody's up as well.
Until its Labor prime minister, Kevin Rudd, starts doing something about that, his claimed green credentials will be just greenwash.
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