Trump’s clean coal: a missed opportunity

Christoforos A.
Aug 24, 2017 · 2 min read

By way of an intro, let me clarify this: I am pro-science to my very core. And yet, once more I felt alienated today from the liberal centre, which traditionally hosts people like me. Trump said this:

We’ve ended the war on beautiful, clean coal, and it’s just been announced that a second, brand-new coal mine, where they’re going to take out clean coal — meaning, they’re taking out coal. They’re going to clean it — is opening in the state of Pennsylvania…

The response of virtually everyone I follow on social media was derision. Needless to offer quotes, here’s the gist: “what an idiot — he thinks you can wash coal”. Some laughed, some sighed, some lamented. No-one said:

Hey POTUS. If you don’t believe in climate change, how come you care whether coal is clean or not? Why not just plain old coal, which is cheaper, too?

(If someone did, let me know — they are going at the top of my social feed.) Let me spell it out for you. It does not matter whether “clean coal” is in fact clean, nor does it matter whether it involves washing coal in a bath. At least not in the first instance. All that matters now is that Mr Trump, leader of the climate change deniers, President of a USA that just exited the Paris Agreement, thought it is worth pointing out that in Penn they clean coal; even more, he found it “beautiful”. This is nothing less than an explicit admission of the value of environmental policy, politically and aesthetically.

Some of you now think I am an idiot, too. Surely I must know that clean coal is not clean, and that it is largely seen as a failed policy kept alive by industrial lobbying, and that in any case (chemical) washing is really a small part of the “clean coal” story, in comparison to capture and storage. Yes, I do know all that, but none of it matters. Because the bar is lower than that.

Here’s where the bar is: should we care whether coal is clean? Donald thinks so. If we get a broad, non-partisan “yes” to this question, then we have a foundation that we can slowly build on. It’s a much smaller step from clean coal to solar, than it is from climate change denial to clean coal.

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Christoforos A.

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