Clean Coal

By now, most people probably know about one of Secretary Hillary Clinton’s biggest campaign gaffes to date: “we’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.” As soon as I heard it, I tweeted: “Imagine a presidential candidate running for office based on putting people out of work?”

In today’s edition of The Heartland Daily Podcast, Mike Duncan, the president and CEO for the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, joins Managing Editor of Environment & Climate News to discuss the Washington D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals decision in mid-January not to place a stay on the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan (CPP).

Among its 645 pages of new red tape for power plants, the EPA states that its proposal “would result in significant reductions of GHG [Green House Gas] emissions that cause harmful climate change, while providing states with ample opportunity to design plans that use innovative, cost-effective strategies that take advantage of investments already being made in programs and measures that lower the carbon intensity of the power sector and reduce GHG emissions.”

Before President Obama took office in 2009, the amount of electricity being produced by coal-fired utilities was approximately fifty percent of the total. Today it is approximately forty percent and, when the Environmental Protection Agency regulations take effect as of June 2, more such utilities are likely to close their doors. The basis for the regulations is utterly devoid of any scientific facts.

NLPC has detailed extensively the wastefulness and folly of spending billions of taxpayer and consumer dollars to subsidize wind energy, solar energy and electric vehicles, all in the name of fighting climate change.

But the complicated, uneconomical boondoggle that Duke Energy built in Edwardsport, Ind. so as to burn coal gas rather than coal – and thus produce less carbon dioxide than a traditional coal plant – may be the dumbest idea to fight imaginary global warming to date. If you swallow the alarmists’ premise and “solutions,” the plant so far is a joke, as recent evidence shows it is using more energy than it produces.

Exports from the Pacific Northwest are an ongoing battleground in the environmental war on coal. Last week, the Sierra Club and three other groups announced that they would file suit…

Oh, the irony. A new report by Greenpeace “puts Apple at bottom of green league table due to reliance on coal at data centres,” according to that reliably climate-alarmist British…