Steven Chu

Dan Gardner reads the front page of the Globe.

The Oscar-winning Coen Brothers recently produced this ad, ridiculing the term “clean coal.” It’s amusing, but doesn’t give much substantive critique. In reality, the coal industry has done much to clean up its nitrogen and sulphur emissions, which our big acid rain problem in the 1970s, 80s and early 90s. Emissions of these pollutants are down 70 per cent, which is what the coal industry means when it says the fuel is “70 per cent cleaner.” The industry hasn’t done much to lessen its carbon emissions to date, mostly because the technology isn’t there yet. Perhaps in the future, the excess CO2 will be separated into carbon and oxygen, or piped underground (both options currently being researched), but the technology is going to need decades of research and massive investment. Plans to build the US’s first CO2 storage coal-fired plant were abandoned last year, as the $1.8 billion FutureGen project in eastern Illinois ran into serious cost overruns. Coal is considered so bad for global warming that even nuclear power, once derided by the greenies, is now considered cleaner than the fossil fuel. Nuclear energy has its problems, with storage of waste and security issues, according to Steven Chu, the Nobel-prize winning new energy secretary. Yet “the safety is better and will continue to get better, and nuclear power is far better for climate than coal.”

Obama announced his energy team yesterday, nominating Nobel physicist Steven Chu to head the Department of Energy. This is an important victory for science and environmentalists, since it is the first time a scientist is heading a major executive branch department since the 1970s, according to Marc Ambinder, political columnist at The Atlantic Monthly. Chu has an impressive resume – he’s a Nobel Prize winning physicist and he’s been the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory since 2004, where he has pushed aggressively for research into solar power, biofuels, and other alternative energy as a way to combat global warming. Obama also gave former EPA administrator Carol Brower a new White House position overseeing environmental, energy, and climate policies. Lisa Jackson of New Jersey to be his Environmental Protection Agency head and Nancy Sutley, deputy mayor of Los Angeles, will lead the White House Council on Environmental Quality.