In coal towns and boardrooms around the world, the promise of ‘clean coal’ is suddenly being touted as our best hope for energy security. But there’s a catch: coal remains the dirtiest source of energy on earth. As Jeff Goodell, author of Big Coal: The Dirty Secret Behind America's Energy Future, puts it: ‘Clean coal is not an actual invention, a physical thing – it is an advertising slogan, like “fat-free donuts” or “interest-free loans”.’ The ‘clean coal’ claim is nothing more than expensive whitewash. Coal’s real appeal is that it’s cheap and abundant. It provides 25 per cent of global energy needs and produces 40 per cent of the world’s electricity. But it’s also an environmental scourge. The United States, which produces 50 per cent of its electricity from coal, has suffered environmental and public health disasters as a result. The American Lung Association reports that 24,000 Americans die prematurely each year from coal-fired power plant pollution. And despite some successful efforts to reduce the outputs that cause acid rain, those plants are still the largest human source of pollutants like mercury, which causes a host of miseries, including poisoning breast milk and devastating child development.
Then there’s carbon dioxide. The US, which has only recently been overtaken by China as the world’s foremost source of greenhouse gases, produces 40 per cent of its gross CO2 output from coal. To maintain this pace, US coal companies have taken to blowing the tops off coal-bearing mountains in a process aptly called mountaintop removal mining.
