What is clean coal, anyway, and should I be in favor of it?
Coal plantIf nothing else, your confusion suggests that whoever came up with the term “clean coal” deserves a raise. After all, the phrase has become so successful that politicians can get in trouble for seeming to oppose it—just ask Sen. Biden—despite the fact that nobody agrees on what it actually means. It’s not hard to see the problems with regular old coal. The mining process destroys the land—not to mention what it does to the miners themselves. In the United States, coal accounts for more than half of nitrogen oxide emissions and about one-quarter of sulfur dioxide pollution, and it’s a major source of the particulate matter that makes smoggy air so hard on your lungs. And even among fellow fossil fuels like petroleum, coal is in a class of its own when it comes to emitting greenhouse gases.
