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- Rockefeller says, "that there are already at work in this country at least two power plants producing electricity from coal that come in at a carbon reduction rate which is right in the middle of where nuclear power is now - that nuclear power doesn't produce carbon dioxide but in other words the emission rate, global warming rate is the same."
As the Wonk Room notes, "There are no coal-fired power plants in the United States that store any significant carbon emissions using carbon capture and sequestration technology (CCS), let alone nearly all carbon emissions. Clean coal does not exist."
Note: Can Sen. Rockefeller please name the two plants he's thinking of? Either we're all misinterpreting his comments or he's counting greenhouse gasses in a much different way than the rest of us.
- The Wonk Room also notes:
Rockefeller repeatedly says that nuclear energy is "considered clean," which is true only if you ask nuclear industry lobbyists.
- More from the Wonk Room:
Rockefeller asked Geithner "why is that we are not talking" about putting CCS research in the economic recovery package. This question is odd, because the package allocates $2.4 billion to carbon capture and sequestration research - more than the $2 billion allocated to all other non-automotive energy efficiency and renewable energy research projects combined.
- Another line from his testimony:
We have a 400 year supply in this country of coal and it doesn't make much sense to me not to try to use American ingenuity, international ingenuity to try to reduce the carbon emissions to approximately where nuclear power is, whatever that is. It's considered clean, so therefore it's got to be pretty good, five, 6%, whatever.
Talking about upping the ante. Not even the coal companies try to sell a 400 year pipe dream. Eighteen months ago a government report said we were down to 100 year supply, not the then often touted 250 year supply. Even then, the report was criticized as unrealistically assuming no growth in coal consumption.
More likely, we are down to 20-40 years of coal reserves, if that.
Senator Barbara Boxer of California noted that coal combustion in this country produces 130 million tons of coal ash every year - enough to fill a train of boxcars stretching from Washington, D.C., to Australia. Amazingly, the task of regulating the more than 600 landfills and impoundments holding this ash is left to the states, which are more often lax than not. Ms. Boxer will press the Obama administration to devise rules for the disposal of coal ash as well as design and construction standards for the impoundments.
Just as the T.V.A. was dealing with this mess, Lacy Thornburg, a federal district judge in North Carolina, ordered the giant utility to reduce emissions from four coal-fired power plants that had been sending pollution into North Carolina.
The ruling validated an unusual legal strategy adopted by North Carolina's attorney general, Roy Cooper, who sued the T.V.A. in 2006 on grounds that pollution from its power plants in Alabama, Tennessee and Kentucky constituted a "public nuisance" to the citizens of his state. Mr. Cooper chose this route because the Bush administration had systematically weakened regulations that had been used in the past to force power companies to clean up their emissions.
Taken together, the coal ash disaster and Judge Thornburg's ruling did much to undercut the coal industry's cheery "clean coal" campaign, whose ads would have us believe that low-polluting coal is here or just around the corner.
Now, if only we can get all our Senators to listen to the latest scientific evidence, not industry lobbyist, to chart our future energy policy.
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