We know, it’s a heavy burden, but it’s your job to make clean coal for the foreseeable future.

Here are the facts.  There is no such thing as clean coal, and there won’t be such a thing for a long time.

The coal industry is running ads showing President Obama, as candidate Obama, saying that “if America can put a man on the moon, don’t tell me we can’t burn coal without releasing carbon dioxide.”  Maybe that’s true, but we aren’t doing it yet, and the moon mission took a decade.

Fifty percent or so of the electricity we use in the United States comes from coal.  In the middle of the country, almost all of the electricity comes from coal.  The coal state senators are going to be hard to budge on cap and trade legislation, and whatever passes congress this year will be a baby step toward curbing carbon dioxide  (a teeny tiny step in the right direction).

But you can start making coal cleaner right now.

How, you ask?  By not wasting electricity.  All the electricity you don’t waste is electricity that doesn’t have to be generated by coal.

Here is the logic.  There is no storage system on the electricity grid (some argue that hydroelectric dams and their reservoirs are grid storage, but very little of our electricity comes from hydro).

When we turn on a switch to use electricity, for all intents and purposes, the power providers have to make that electricity right then.  They can’t make some today and save it for you to use tomorrow or next week.  A majority of the time, power companies are burning coal to make that electricity.

So when you don’t waste electricity, you keep the power providers from burning coal that had no real use.  Where can you find wasted electricity: in your unattended power, phantom power, vampire power, call it what you will.  Also in the rooms with lights on when nobody is there, or the TVs or game systems or computers running when nobody is watching or playing.

Look around your house to see where the only form of current clean coal is hiding.

Here are some videos about unattended power:

Simple things you can do to save energy around the home

http://endependence.info/research/videos-c-6-v-15.html

End phantom power drain-cartoon

http://endependence.info/research/videos-c-6-v-44.html

An Introduction to GreenSwitch with Ed Begley, Jr.

http://endependence.info/research/videos-c-6-v-24.html

Do they think we’re stupid?

It is all the rage in Washington to talk about energy independence.  As a matter of fact, Presidents have been talking about it as far back as Nixon.  Watch this video to see how easy it is to use energy independence as a talking point from the right or the left.

http://endependence.info/research/videos-c-12-v-65.html

So, what has happened since 1974?  We are dependent on foreign countries for close to 70% of our transportation sector energy (oil).   All they did was talk, not act.

The spike in oil prices this past summer made for more good political palaver.

Drill, baby, drill

How can a country with 3% of the world’s oil supply that uses 25% of the world’s oil drill itself to energy independence?

Then there is “all of the above” rhetoric.  Clean coal, nuclear, wind, solar, tidal, geothermal, hybrid electric cars.

This is another political pander.  Where is conservation is this mix?  What the heck is clean coal?  Nuclear plants take years to build, we don’t have a way to dispose of the radioactive waste and they cost hundreds of millions of dollars to decommission?

Check out these sites to find out about nuclear waste storage and decommissioning issues:

http://library.thinkquest.org/17940/texts/nuclear_waste_storage/nuclear_waste_storage.html

http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/basic-ref/students/waste.html

http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/basic-ref/students/decommissioning.html

This is a chance for the people. business and government to work together to merge the two goals of energy independence and ending dependence on polluting fuel.  Solar, wind, tidal, geothermal, conservation, plant waste biofuels, electric cars.  These are the things we must do to achieve endependence.

Endependence=energy independence

that ends dependence on polluting fuels.