'60 Minutes' Blows it on Coal Segment

'60 Minutes' Blows it on Coal Segment
By Tara Lohan, AlterNet
April 27, 2009

http://www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/138605/%2760_minutes%27_blows_it_on_coal_segment/
http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/138605/?type=blog
http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/www.alternet.org/138605/

[Read comments:
http://www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/138605/%2760_minutes%27_blows_it_on_coal_segment/#comments ]

Last night the CBS news program "60 Minutes" did a segment about so-called clean coal. Unfortunately, they missed the boat ... big time.

Here's their intro:

The future of our climate might be summed up in one question: what do we do about coal? Coal generates nearly half the electricity in the United States and the world. But it's the dirtiest fuel of all when it comes to carbon dioxide, or CO2, the leading greenhouse gas.

The entire segment focused on whether it was possible to get carbon capture and sequestration technology (CCS) to trap CO2 gases from coal-burning power plants onto all of our coal plants in time to stave off our climate crisis. To begin with, the technology has serious problems and there is no way that it can be implemented in the time frame top scientists tell us we need to drastically reduce our CO2 emissions -- less than 10 years.

Despite all that, the basis of their segment was also flawed from the get go. Cleaning up coal is not the answer to the climate crisis. In fact, what we should be doing is getting rid of it altogether.

In the segment Jim Rogers, CEO of Duke Energy says, "We can't abandon coal. We have to find a way to keep it and use it in the future. And that means the ability to clean it up."

This is a flat out lie. Transitioning away from coal is the best thing we can do. And one of the main reasons why was never addressed by "60 Minutes." Coal can never be clean. Period. We can spend decades and decades as the Earth warms to try to figure out how to capture carbon emissions and find a way to safely dispose of them, but we can never make the process of extracting it from the ground a clean deal.


To read the full article or more by this author: http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/www.alternet.org/138605/