Unconventional Sources

The American public seems to have understood: The reality is that there is no such thing as clean coal. But, have the politicians received the message yet?

Politicians, Democrats as much as Republicans, are trying to get government funding for new dirty coal burning power plants at every opportunity. To get elected officials to listen to the clean energy majority of Americans, and stop government support for dirty coal energy, citizens are going to have to speak loudly enough to counter the dollars of the coal industry’s lobbyists.

That’s just what’s going on in South Carolina, where the people say no to new to coal. It’s a simple, direct campaign: SC Says No opposes all new coal plants in the state.

Some industry lobbyists are trying to argue that, since their bosses have messed up the economy, climate change is no longer an important issue that matters to the American people. Thanks to the people who organized the Capitol Climate Action today – a protest at a coal-burning power plant in Washington, D.C. They proved the industry lobbyists wrong – and proved that Americans can keep their eye on the ball. Economic recovery cannot come without environmentally sustainable energy reform. We can’t rebuild America’s engines using the same old dirty fossil fuels.

Given that President Barack Obama is supporting the hoax of “clean coal”, this message could not be more timely. We don’t need climate change – but we do need real change of the political climate in Washington D.C.

Industry public relations are one thing. They are backed up by enough money to make any idea – even the ludicrous idea of clean coal – look reasonable. Sure, clean coal power plants haven’t actually been invented yet, but that won’t stop coal companies from asking for government money for clean coal.

What does coal really look like? It looks like this:

This image comes to us from United Mountain Defense. That’s an Appalachian activist organization that is rallying in defiance of the mountaintop removal coal mining, which takes mountains covered in clean streams and forests, and destroys them in search of coal, leaving nothing but piles of barren, toxic rubble.

Here’s another picture of clean coal:

Okay, maybe it’s not just your MP3 player, and maybe it’s not just you, but the American appetite for cheap electricity has indeed destroyed mountains. That’s not a figurative statement.

I Love Mountains logs 470 mountains that have been destroyed through mountaintop coal mining.

In a particularly useful tool for encouraging accountability, the site allows a person to enter in their zip code and see whether their own local power company burns coal from mountaintop removal. Mine – NYSEG – does, at the AES Cayuga coal burning power plant.

That gives me information about how my energy conservation can make a real impact in reducing mountaintop removal, air pollution and global warming.

When we think about how far our society is willing to go in fueling its rollocking good time disposable material culture, this ought to be an icon in everyone’s memory: A mountain gone where once it stood, and the land all around laid to waste. Mountains are supposed to be eternal – at least in the scope of human imagination. Now, they’re regarded as just more resources for corporations to exploit.

This is not a mythological fantasy imagined by Lorax-mimicking tree huggers. It’s a reality, and it’s been documented by a dedicated non-profit organization: Appalachian Voices.

Recently, they’ve teamed up with Oil Change International to produce the database behind the following widget, which you can use to see how much dirty coal money your congressional representative in Washington has taken.

(I find that incoming U.S. Senator from New York Kirsten Gillibrand has taken $1,000 in dirty coal money from Entergy Corporation, for example.)

U.S. Senators and Congressional representatives have accepted $40,404,519 from the coal industry since 2000.
Enter your zipcode to see how dirty your congresspeople are: