coal

It's worth keeping your eye on West Virginia these days, where a campaign of civil disobedience against coal mining activities is attracting increasingly tough reprimand from state judges.

I’m digging deep, and maybe even stepping on a few toes, but a Guardian report via ThinkProgress (or is it vice versa?) cites coal industry spokesman Joe Lucas as saying that mountaintop removal in Appalachia performs a civic function by creating flat earth.

Whoever scooped it hasn’t gotten nearly enough coverage, so let’s revisit with envy and ask how she, or he, got Lucas to step on his own tongue, as it were.

Just in time for ABC’s quote from environmentalist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. calling President Barack Obama an indentured servant of the coal industry (and Kennedy’s later retraction), comes the pronouncement from none other than the chair of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), Jon Wellinghoff (who joined the FERC under Bush), that the U.S. may never need another coal plant. Or nuclear plant, Wellinghoff added, noting that the concept of baseload capacity (i.e., coal-fired power plants running 24.7) may become a thing of the past.

Wellinghoff seems to suggest that renewable energy can be used in a complimentary fashion; wind kicking in on cloudy days, solar taking up the load on calm days, biomass filling the interstices and technologically advanced energy storage systems balancing the load. Currently, the U.S. has more than 10 percent of its power mix in renewables – and that includes a whopping 6.6 percent in hydroelectric (January 2009). But throw in advanced energy efficiencies, demand-side management (DSM; think crowd control for delivery), and some truly revolutionary advances like molted salt technology, and one begins to see the possibilities.

When people argue that the use of coal and other fossil fuels is still cheaper than renewable energy they usually (and conveniently) fail to mention the external costs of fossil fuels that aren't factored into the price of burning of these dirty fuels.

On the Wall Street Journal's Environment Capital blog today there's a great post explaining how:

"... fossil fuels remain cheaper because not all their costs are tallied—and that means pollution. Traditional power plants spew particulates into the air as well as carbon dioxide, but historically the cost of that pollution was not included in the pricetag for, say, operating a coal-fired plant."

Read the entire WSJ post here:  AC/DC: What’s the True Cost of Electricity?