NRDC Shills for Coal Industry
Sep 7th, 2009 in NewswireNRDC Shills for Coal Industry and CCS
In an article in today’s New York Times, the Natural Resource Defense Council makes a pitch for the coal industry. NRDC wants to make sure the upcoming Senate climate change bill contains $10 billion in research and development for carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) which will largely benefit the coal industry. The article puts NRDC on the side of the coal industry in the climate debate, saying:
“But it is not only coal-industry lobbyists and their Congressional supporters who favor the concept of carbon sequestration. David Hawkins, a climate change expert at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said simply replacing coal with natural gas for power generation was “not a viable strategy” because that would merely delay climate change by a few decades.
“A coal plant with carbon capture and storage is a cleaner plant than an uncontrolled natural gas plant,” he said.”
We thought NRDC was an advocate for a clean environment, not more coal and expensive, untried, and risky CCS. And what about the environmental and social justice community that NRDC tries to embrace? How do they feel about providing $10 billion in taxpayer funds for CCS to keep the coal plants in their neighborhoods up and running?
Mr. Hawkins statements confirm that ACESA and the Senate bill modeled on ACESA benefits big business, not human health and the environment.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/07/business/07gas.html?th&emc=th
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CCS is not even required to capture 100% of the carbon from coal fired power plants. When CCS is finally required to be installed between 2020-2025, according to the House-passed climate bill ACESA, if a coal power plant captures 50% of it’s carbon emissions, it will receive a handsome PAYMENT of something like $50/ton of CO2 it captures!
Compare that to the starting price for carbon EMISSIONS estimated for ACESA: $10/ton of CO2 emission.
And, the other 50% of carbon will still WAYYY exceed the emissions from natural gas, per unit of energy obtained…. Read More
So, NRDC simply misrepresented facts!
And that’s not even to mention the environmental devastation from mountain top removal mining, the asthma, cancer and heart disease from coal power plants, the coal ash waste disposal problem, and, of course, the insecure storage of captured CO2, which over time WILL leak out of their underground storage sites, negating the capturing in the first place (which consumed a lot of extra energy), and even endangering population above the storage site.