While the "clean coal" lobby would like us to think coal is cheap, the State of New York Power Authority has a differing opinion.
Plans for a $1.6 billion advanced coal plant in the Town of Tonawanda have been scrapped after the New York Power Authority found the plan too costly, even with some pretty steep financial assistance from taxpayers.
Plans for a $4 billion coal to liquid fuel plant in Kentucky have been unveiled today, spelling a new low-point in the US addiction to dirty energy.
The idea of converting coal to liquid fuel (known as coal-to-liquids or CTL) is not new.
A heated anti-coal demonstration in Newcastle, Australia yesterday is the latest in a string of protests worldwide.
Thirty seven demonstrators were arrested after about 1000 people
halted trains in Newcastle yesterday in a protest against the coal
industry's role in climate change.
According to a new report out today by the Worldwatch Institute, a transition to renewable energy sources promises significant global job gains at a time when the coal industry has been hemorrhaging jobs for years.
In the United States alone, coal industry employment has fallen by half in the last 20 years, despite a one-third increase in production.
"President Bush has signed a $162 billion war supplemental that will fund the wars in Iraq and Ahghanistan into 2009."
A report put out in October of 2005 by the Renewable Energy Policy Project, the Apollo Alliance and Policy Matters Ohio puts the $162 billion mentioned in the above headline into some perspective.
As Ross Gelbspan blogged today, the Group of Eight (G-8) has pledged to reduce carbon emissions by 50% by 2050. It makes for great headlines, but the small print shows several things: they failed to set a short term emissions reduction goal, and a large part of their Grand Forty-Two Year Plan is to go "low-carbon" by - you guessed it - using carbon capture and sequestration, also known as the "clean coal" pipe dream.
So, I am new to blogging on Coal Is Dirty, but if you follow the other sites where I post -- Its Getting Hot In Here and RAN's Understory -- you'll see that I post ALOT about radical environmentalists fighting King Coal using non-violent direct action.
A few years ago, I took some time to travel through Australia. While there I made friends with a number of Aussie climate activists and did a bit of organizing with them. They are beautiful people doing brilliant work.
Australian coal amounts to about 30% of the emissions coming from coal worldwide. They are selling it like crazy to East Asia. Australia is also deeply impacted by climate change (drought, rising sea levels etc).
Coal investors are taking some hits around the world.
Coal prices in the U.S., Europe and Australia fell 10% causing many investors to chose flight over fight. Falling coal prices wiped out about $25 billion from Australian resources stocks. The Dow Jones U.S. Coal Index tumbled 14%.
