Obama, Clinton and McCain on Coal

by: Clem Guttata

Sun Jun 08, 2008 at 17:18:03 PM EDT

h/t to Macgregor Thomson for putting this together. Some factual corrections/updates on the candidates statements.

1) Last I heard, China is no longer opening one coal factory a week. China's widespread usage of coal is a huge environmental issue, but with coal shortages and a growing environmental movement, the rate of new plant openings is slowing.

2) The FutureGen project in Illinois was cancelled by the Bush administration.

3) The cost estimates for so-called clean coal technology (e.g., coal-to-liquid, coal-to-gas, carbon capture and sequestration) are going up, not down.

What we should be talking about for energy policy is things like energy efficiency, negawatts, and micro-power generation, not yet another set of large scale centralized energy production solutions that further concentrate corporate power with large-scale high-risk hugely expensive government investments.