This is yet another of my PSA posts...
Seriously... Even if coal could be burned in a way that is "clean," mining it and processing it are EXTREMELY dirty. Coal mining pollutes the immediate environment around the mining operation, causing asthma, cancer and other serious health problems in humans, as well as water sources, which carry the pollutants - including many which cause cancer and kill entire freshwater ecosystems - downstream where people are directly exposed without knowing that it's happening. Coal companies are not required to notify people who live downstream that the pollutants could kill them and their children or even that the pollutants are being released into their water. Coal companies are not required to clean-up their own mess. They profit (just like some bankers you might have heard about recently) and taxpayers pay for the clean-up, if any clean-up happens at all. THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS CLEAN COAL!!!
Promote and support wind, solar, hydroelectric and geothermal energy! Go here or here or here to learn just a few of the ways you can help.
Pass it on...
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
There have been endless discussions of this subject at the office, and every time it comes up, I get a mental picture of a little man with a toothbrush, scrubbing away at lumps of coal to make them all nice and clean.
Since coal is carbon, and the point of so-called clean coal is to reduce carbon, isn't the whole idea rather nonsensical? :p
LOL! That would probably be the only way to get coal clean in any measure without an overhaul of the entire industry and its practices, not to mention the invention of a lot of highly impressive technology... which puts me in mind of a two-part episode of Doctor Who where some evil aliens got 400 million humans to install a GPS/carbon eliminating system in their cars, which turned their cars into zero carbon emissions vehicles... But it all backfired when the aliens flipped a switch and simultaneously released all the poisonous gases the devices had filtered out over the many months they were installed in the cars, causing people to die from asphyxia in major metropolitan areas all over the world... or would have, if the Doctor hadn't been on the case...
But yeah... completely nonsensical.
Next thing you know, coal miners will be back earning company scrip... bleh. I agree completely.
Post a Comment