Nathan Scandella (personal)

"Clean" Fossil Fuels

Sarah Palin has been doing a lot of talking on the campaign trail about energy. Not just the kind of energy she feels when she steps into one of her new $10,000 Nieman Marcus suits. But the kind of energy that we use to power our homes, factories, and cars. It may seem silly to criticize Palin for the things she says, just as it would be silly to lecture a parrot about the words that come out of its mouth ... but for all those in her audience that are still interested in learning, I offer the following clarifications.

The clean energy Palin is talking about doesn't exist. The energy she, and John McCain, want to bring online to help fuel the country is anything but clean. Palin wants to increase Alaska's oil and natural gas extraction. At the risk of overstating the obvious, oil is not clean. Oil will never be clean. Oil, when burned, produces large amounts of CO2, formed by removing oxygen from the air, and carbon from the earth's core. CO2 is one of the primary reasons that are climate is changing more rapidly than we can keep up with. Natural gas is also not "clean" or "green", as Palin has repeatedly stated. Natural gas is also a fossil fuel, mostly methane. When combusted, it gives off CO2 just like oil. If it's not combusted (e.g. lost to leakage), it's an even more potent greenhouse gas (GHG) than CO2 (by a factor of 23!). While burning natural gas returns more useful energy (per unit CO2) than oil, it's still not renewable and cannot be used sustainably without contributing negatively to climate change. Only technologies which are an order of magnitude more efficient than oil (energy per unit GHG) can be part of our long-term energy mix.

Palin has also been talking a lot about "Clean Coal". First of all, clean coal does not exist. It may someday, but that's unclear. For coal to be clean, that would mean that the massive quantities of CO2 produced in its conversion to electricity, not to mention all the other harmful pollutants, will have to be filtered, or sequestered. At the rate that CO2 is produced in the process, recapturing it will be enormously difficult to do, while maintaining energy throughput and cost. By all means, Clean Coal research and development should be pursued. But assuming that clean coal will be part of our energy portfolio anytime soon is a pipe dream. For now, and the foreseeable future, we have Dirty Coal. That's it. Ethanol, biodiesel, geothermal, and even hydrogen fuel cell technology are all currently further along than Clean Coal. I haven't heard much from Palin about any of those technologies. Perhaps that's because she's not campaigning in states where those technologies have huge industrial bases already built up. She has, however, been stumping in coal states.

Finally, McCain and Palin are advocating a return to nuclear energy growth (actually Palin advocates for "nucular", but we'll leave that one alone). While I agree that nuclear is better than coal - and will be needed to meet electrical demand while wind, solar, biofuels, geothermal, and tidal energy come online - nuclear power is also not clean. There is the small matter of nuclear waste, which nobody seems to want to have stored anywhere near where they live.

I know people would love to be able to satisfy that infinitesimal bit of conscience they have about driving gas guzzlers and choosing the cheapest possible energy solutions. Unfortunately, if you're under the impression that McCain and Palin have a common-sense plan for energy independence, that's also environmentally friendly, you're the one who's "green". As in gullible, and easily fooled.

Posted at 02:35AM Nov 03, 2008 by Nathan in Environment  |  Comments[2]