As reported by Mother Jones earlier this week, some of our favorite midwestern Democrats sent a bill to the Democratic leadership asking for more carbon offsets for coal-burning utility companies in the Senate's energy/climate change bill.
The signers included:
Minnesota's Al Franken and Amy Klobuchar, Tom Harkin of Iowa, Michael Bennet and Mark Udall of Colorado, Kent Conrad and Byron Dorgan of North Dakota, Russell Feingold and Herb Kohl of Wisconsin, Carl Levin and Debbie Stabenow of Michigan, Sherrod Brown of Ohio, Roland Burris of Illinois, and Robert Byrd of West Virginia.
It's amazing what a $47 Million PR Spending Spree will buy you.
The letter referenced above, in a nutshell, asks that life be made easier for coal-burning utilities under a cap and trade CO2 scenario. This is despite the horrible things coal is responsible for, as diaried in this great diary posted yesterday.
In addition, a new study by Physicians for Social Responsibility states:
Coal pollutants affect all major body organ systems and contribute to four of the five leading causes of mortality in the U.S.: heart disease, cancer, stroke, and chronic lower respiratory diseases. This conclusion emerges from our reassessment of the widely recognized health threats from coal. Each step of the coal lifecycle—mining, transportation, washing, combustion, and disposing of postcombustion wastes—impacts human health. Coal combustion in particular contributes to diseases affecting large portions of the U.S. population, including asthma, lung cancer, heart disease, and stroke, compounding the major public health challenges of our time. It interferes with lung development,
increases the risk of heart attacks, and compromises intellectual capacity.
So, yeah, I'm not a big fan of coal.
I get it that coal is a big jobs provider and that many of these jobs are union, so Democrats probably feel that they need to pay lip service to coal. However, if our liberal Democrats in Washington don't start telling folks the truth about coal, how are we ever going to wean ourselves from it?
I wrote to my senators, Levin and Stabenow, telling them this & got a response from Senator Stabenow. It reads, in part:
I share your commitment to protecting our environment and creating new jobs through a low-carbon economy.
Global climate change is a real threat to Michigan. Not only are temperatures rising, but increased evaporation could cause Great Lakes water levels to drop significantly, affecting water supplies, fish stocks, shipping, and recreation. There is no question that now is the time to act.
However, comprehensive climate legislation must be done right and with great care. Michigan's economy has suffered greatly during this economic downturn, and climate legislation must not make our situation worse. I believe that by making the right policy choices and the right investments, we can reduce greenhouse gas emissions in a way that revitalizes Michigan's economy and creates new jobs.
And to that end, she is sponsoring tax credits for solar power (who doesn't love tax credits). From that article:
Lawmakers on the House and Senate tax-writing committees offered identical bills this month that provide a new 30 percent credit for investments in equipment used to manufacture solar energy system components.
The bills would make these investments eligible for the existing 30 percent credit for installation of residential and business solar energy systems, which is available through 2016.
Personally, I don't know how renewables are ever going to be able to fully compete w/ dirty energy like coal until the full costs (health effects, CO2, etc.) are factored in. Making things easier on coal burning utility companies ain't going to help that.
But don't worry, we'll have "Clean Coal" to save us, right? Well, from
Mother Jones:
But for all their expensive efforts to sell the public on the wonders of clean coal, ACCCE isn't working quite as hard to make the technology a reality. The coalition's members have committed the comparatively paltry sum of $3.6 billion to research the technology between 2003 and 2017, according to an April report from the Center for American Progress. That's just $257 million on average each year to develop the technology to capture and sequester carbon. To put that in perspective, ACCCE's members made a combined total of $297 billion in profits between 2003 and 2008—meaning, as the report notes, that they're spending less than two cents on clean coal research for every $1 of profit.
Think they realize it's not a good investment?