The Reality Blog

The Dirt on “Clean”
Part 2: Less than 100 tons of poison

In part 1 of the Dirt on “Clean,” we introduced you to some of the reasons why the coal industry’s 77% cleaner claim is misleading — their omission of CO2, their sloppy chemistry that lumps different pollutants together, and their numbers manipulation that overstates reductions and hides emissions increases.

Of course, that’s just the beginning of what the coal industry isn’t telling you.

For starters, they don’t mention the poisons — toxic compounds like arsenic, mercury and lead that are all released by burning coal.

The coal industry conveniently doesn’t mention these hazardous pollutants alongside their 77% claim because they “did not track emissions of less than 100 tons per year.” Unfortunately for us, it takes a whole lot less than 100 tons of these poisons to do some serious damage.

What’s the Reality?
According to the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS):

• 1/70th of a teaspoon of Mercury can be enough to make the fish in a 25-acre lake unsafe to eat.
• Water containing 50 parts per billion of Arsenic will cause cancer in 1 out of 100 people who drink it.

So how much of these poisons are emitted by coal? UCS estimates, each year, an average 500 MW power plant produces:

• 170 pounds of mercury
• 225 pounds of arsenic
• 114 pounds of lead
• 4 pounds of cadmium, trace amounts of uranium, other toxic heavy metals

Remember, there are about 600 coal-fired power plants operating in America today. Based on those per plant averages, that would be roughly 67 tons of arsenic, and 51 tons of mercury per year — but don’t worry, that’s way under their 100 ton tracking threshold.

And that’s just the pollution that goes into the air. The coal plant also produces toxic waste that doesn’t go up the smokestack. This coal ash and sludge is a super-toxic stew that includes all the compounds and waste that the coal industry has been forced to keep out of the air.

Most of this waste is stored in landfills and ponds at power-plants. Unfortunately, it doesn’t always stay there.

In December 2008, an embankment collapsed at a coal waste pond in Tennessee, resulting in 1.1 billion gallons of toxic sludge flowing across land and into the Emory River. And just last week, a smaller spill occurred into Maryland’s Potomac river when a coal ash pipe sprung a leak and wasn’t noticed for 12 hours.

The Environmental Protection Agency recently announced they would consider new regulations on such storage facilities. But the fact remains, there’s nothing “clean” or “77% cleaner” about “less than 100 tons” of arsenic, mercury or lead — whether it’s going up a smokestack, sitting in a storage pond, or polluting our lakes, rivers and lands.

But this is not the end of the Dirt on “Clean.” Next up, we’ll look at how the coal industry proudly touts their gains, while fighting tooth and nail for decades to avoid cleaning up their act.

The Dirt on “clean”
part 1: Dude, where’s your CO₂?

This is the first in a series of posts taking a closer look at the coal industry’s wildly misleading claims of cleanliness.

We all know coal is dirty. Burning coal is the dirtiest way we produce electricity and is responsible for one third of the CO₂ we release into the atmosphere.

Merriam-Webster’s first definition of “clean” is “free from dirt or pollution.” Coal is anything but, so how does the coal industry justify making the claim that coal is clean? What type of fuzzy math do they use to avoid stepping in a big pile of Reality? Very selective accounting, glaring omissions and above all — a low regard for the truth and our future.

First let’s take a look at their big claim to success: That they are “77% cleaner” since 1970.

What’s the reality?
There’s one huge problem with the 77% figure. The coal industry has decided to conveniently leave out carbon dioxide.

CO₂ is a leading cause of global warming and the climate crisis. What’s more, CO₂ emissions from coal have actually been increasing — about 25% since 1990. Today, coal-fired plants in the US release more than 2.1 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide each year.

But somehow, the coal industry doesn’t include CO₂ emissions on their chart labeled “Overall Emissions.” Instead, of the many by-products and pollutants produced by burning coal, their figure only includes five government regulated pollutants — carbon monoxide, volatile organic compounds, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide and particulate matter.

Each of these are very different, but the coal industry doesn’t disclose how much of each they produce. Rather, to arrive at their 77% number, they lump these very different pollutants together. What’s more, “77%” doesn’t even represent an actual reduction in all of these emissions. Instead, it’s a ratio (”regulated emissions per unit of energy produced”). So, as production has increased over the past twenty years, some of these emissions have even gone up. Of course, they don’t tell you that either.

Poor chemistry, deceptive accounting, and a glaring omission of CO₂ from their emissions data — so far, “clean coal” isn’t looking so “free from dirt or pollution.”

Your next dose of reality… the deadly poisons that the coal industry also isn’t telling you about! Stay tuned for part 2.

Guess who’s #1?

A new report by the Center for Public Integrity finds explosive growth over the last five years in the number of lobbyists seeking to influence climate change legislation.

It turns out, the coal industry has been pretty busy lobbying for legislation friendly to the dirty status quo. In fact, they were #1 in these lobbying efforts.

According to the report, 770 companies and interest groups hired an estimated 2,340 lobbyists in the past year — with expenditures topping $90 million. Among all these groups, it’s no surprise that the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE) came in at #1:

ACCCE spent $10.5 million lobbying Capitol Hill on climate in 2008 — more than any other organization solely dedicated to the issue.

Good ‘ol ACCCE — spending money on lobbying almost as fast as their industry pumps carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Now that the EPA is reconsidering regulating C0₂ emissions how do you think they feel about that chunk of change?

It seems they find it cheaper to market and lobby than actually investing in the development of a commercial-scale system of carbon capture and storage. Such a system still doesn’t exist for a single one of the more than 600 power plants in operation in the US, and until it does, claiming that coal is “clean” is just blowing a whole lot of smoke.

Current playlist

There’s a lot of stuff going on in Reality. Here are some recent articles and videos to get you up to speed on what’s happening with coal and what folks are saying about it.

Read
NYT: Is America Ready to Quit Coal?

Reuters: Georgia bill proposes moratorium on new coal plants

HuffPo: Top 5 Myths about Coal

WaPo Op-ed: ‘Clean’ Coal? Don’t Try to Shovel That

WSJ - Environmental Capital: Goodbye, Coal: What Power Options Are Left?

Watch
The Reality Campaign on The Rachel Maddow show

Our latest ads: Smudge and Facility

Vice President Al Gore on Current TV

Coal in a Comic
Popular Science: How “Clean” Can Coal Be