President Trump sure loves clean coal . He ’s talked it up for some time now – before , during , and after the 2016 campaign – and he recently brought it up again during a rally this week in Phoenix , Arizona .
Speaking to a crew of supporter , he observe that an unspecified new ember mine in Pennsylvania would burn “ clean coal … meaning they ’re taking out ember and they ’re going to clean it . ”
Now , in case you did n’t pull in , clean coal is about as substantial as radioactive - free atomic number 94 . Much like the President ’s ability tolistento any scientist of any kind , clean coalsimply does n’t exist . It ’s a concept that has , for technological and economical reasons , never quite made it into the existent world .
broadly speaking , the term refers to the supposed ability of sophisticated green goddess mess that are able to trickle outallof the particulates , pollutant , and greenhouse gas emitted from the notoriously dirty fogy fuel as it ’s burned .
As a serial of catastrophicallyexpensivetrials have demonstrated , this remarkable - sound capacity can not be achieved in anything other than theory . Industry experts and academics have resolve that you either pick out to combust coal as is , or not bite it at all .
As you may have guessed at this point , clean coal is n’t what the President of the United States thinks it is . miner do not take out ember from the bowels of the Earth , give it over to a scientist , who then wipes it clean with a special skill fabric . ember does n’t have a clean nerve ; it ’s as carbon - plentiful as the rest of it . It ’s not a affair of spiff up it up .
Clean coal is just a unicorn that Trump likes to rive out of his hat from clip to sentence . Hementionedit when he signed the Executive Order rescinding Obama ’s Clean Power Plan back in March , and again when he announced thewithdrawalfrom the Paris climate agreement . The Department of Energy ( DoE ) chief Rick Perry has bring in the term uprepeatedlyever since he took the job .
We can not emphasize this enough : clean coal does not be . We could have sex on about how much we love those endearing cocktail bar that are all over Mars , but then that would n’t make it true , would it ?
Never take care though . While the President praises white coal , therest of Americais go on with clean energy , like wind and solar – which , you lie with , isactually light .
[ H / T : Los Angeles Times ]
