the
new president attempts to deliver on
his promise to reduce carbon dioxide emissions in the
country 80 percent by 2050. Depending on who’s speaking,
coal is either the villain or part of the solution.
“The
coal groups are saying we need clean coal,” said Mark
Maddox, the former head of the Energy Department’s
fossil energy office under former President George
W. Bush, in an interview. “Environmentalists are
saying there is no clean coal, and we aren’t going to
help you get it.”
Coal
is at the center of the discussion about so-called green
energy because the fuel provides half of U.S. electricity
-- and 30 percent of the greenhouse-gas emissions that
contribute to global warming.
The
issue, framed in dueling television campaigns, is whether
U.S. energy policy should be based on what is still
largely an assumption: that technology can capture carbon
emissions before they go into the air and store them
permanently underground.
$300 Million
Campaign
Portraying clean
coal as a mirage, the Alliance for Climate Protection’s first
commercial, shown on broadcast and cable networks
starting last December, features an announcer showing off
“today’s clean-coal technology” as he gestures
toward empty terrain. In a new ad now running, an actor
playing a coal company executive says, “Don’t worry
about climate change, leave that to us.”
The commercials
are the start of an ad campaign for clean energy that the
group, based in Menlo Park, California, has said will cost
$300 million over 3 years. Spokesman Brian Hardwick
declined to say how much advertising has been purchased so
far. Gore is the organization’s founder and chairman.
“We thought it
was a key moment to let people know that we are faced with
a climate crisis, and we shouldn’t have any illusion
that clean coal exists today,” Hardwick said in an
interview.
Obama’s
Words
Gore has called
for the U.S. to produce all of its electricity from
renewable energy by 2018, instead of “dirty fossil
fuels” such as coal and oil.
After the
environmentalists began their anti-coal commercials,
response ads were mustered by companies led by Peabody of
St. Louis and operators of coal-fired power plants, such
as the Southern
Co. of Atlanta and American
Electric Power Co. of Columbus, Ohio.
The coal
industry’s commercials tap into Obama’s credentials as
a clean-energy advocate, showing excerpts from a speech he
gave in Lebanon, Virginia, in September.
“Clean-coal
technology is something that can make America
energy-independent,” Obama says in the ad, which has run
on cable channels such as CNN, Fox News and MSNBC.
The
industry-sponsored American
Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity spent $18 million
last year on television commercials, compared with the $48
million for those run by Gore’s group, according to Joe
Lucas, a spokesman for the Alexandria, Virginia-based
group of coal producers and users.
False Start
“We thought it
was important to do what we could to get another side of
the story out there,” said Michael
Morris, AEP’s chief executive, in an interview. The
industry is trying “to reach out to some of the policy
makers” with its message that adding restrictions on
coal would damage the already struggling economy.
Power producers
spent $36 billion on coal in 2007 and consumers paid $343
billion for electricity from all sources, or almost 3
percent of U.S. gross domestic product, according to data
from the Energy
Information Administration.
Prospects for the
new technology were clouded last year, when Samuel
Bodman, Bush’s Energy secretary, canceled plans to
build a clean-coal plant in Illinois. The cost of the
facility, initially estimated at $1 billion, had soared to
at least $1.8 billion. Bodman said funding the technology
at multiple plants would be an “all-around better
deal.”
The House-passed
version of Obama’s economic stimulus plan would provide
$2.4 billion for development of carbon capture and
storage, according to a summary issued by Speaker Nancy
Pelosi, a California Democrat. The version now before
the Senate has at least $4.6 billion for that purpose,
according to Bill
Wicker, a spokesman for Senate Energy Committee
Chairman Jeff
Bingaman, a New Mexico Democrat.
‘Robust
Research’
Obama, who has
pledged to spend $150 billion over 10 years to combat
climate change and create “green” jobs, hasn’t said
how much of that should go to clean-coal technology.
Even Gore
supports research.
‘It’s quite
responsible to support robust research into whether or not
it might in the future become possible to safely capture
and sequester CO2 from coal plants,” Gore said in
testimony last week before the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee. “But we should not delude ourselves about the
likelihood that that’s going to occur in the near-term
or even the mid-term.”
While Gore
remains skeptical, industry groups are encouraged that
members of the Obama administration have tempered their
past comments about coal, according to Luke
Popovich, a vice president for the Washington-based National
Mining Association, which represents coal producers.
‘A Huge
Sum’
Months before
Obama’s campaign remarks about the promise of new
technology, he said in a recorded interview
with the San Francisco Chronicle last January, “If
somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can,
it’s just that it will bankrupt them because they’re
going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas
that’s being emitted.”
Obama’s Energy
Secretary Steven
Chu had called coal his “worst nightmare” in a
2007 speech. At his Senate confirmation hearing on Jan.
13, Chu said the fuel is a “great natural resource”
that the “the U.S., with its great technological
leadership, should rise to the occasion to develop.”
To contact the
reporter on this story: Daniel
Whitten in Washington at dwhitten2@bloomberg.net
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