Dinjiin:
There is no such thing as clean coal.

The coal mining process is very destructive to the environment, regardless if it is deep mining or strip mining. The mining process releases various heavy and radioactive metals that are found in coal seams. Iron sulfide in the seams forms sulfuric acid when exposed to precipitation. Methane gas, a known greenhouse gas, is also released. Much of this escapes from coal slag that is dumped near the mine.

Fair enough, though deep mining doesn't actually destroy plant life or use much surface area, so pretending they're equivalent environmentally is very disingenious (ok, can't spell that word, apparently). Heavy metals just need to be monitored (don't eat fish from a runoff stream, once it gets to the ocean you're fine, with the possible exception of mercury in bottom-feeders) and radioactives are largely harmless, godzilla movies aside. Sulfide is a legitimate concern, which is why there are already a number of methods in place for dealing with it. Fuel engineers haven't been sitting around with their thumbs up their asses for the last two centuries, you know, fixing the acid rain thing was the big engineering problem of the late 1900s.


As for burning it, well, all of those heavy metals and radioactive metals are expelled into the atmosphere. Much of that can be reduced by using scrubbers and/or by performing a "liquid coal" extraction prior to use, but then you still need to dispose of it afterwards. Not to mention that the conversion to liquid coal is nasty in its own regard.

The point of 'clean coal' is to not just straight-up burn it. If you've kept the contaminants from being released into the atmosphere, you're fine. Most of them can be buried in an old defunct mine with no impact whatsoever, or even just left lying about. Remember, the stuff has been sitting around in solid form for centuries without doing anything to you, if we keep it in solid form it will continue in its innofensiveness, largely speaking.


Ethanol alcohol fuel is fine as long as you get it from proper sources, such as Miscanthus ryegrass and sugar cane. It is even better when extracted from cellulose such agriculture plant waste.

It fails as a green source when you use a crop such as corn. Of course, ethanol wouldn't be profitable from a low sugar yield crop like corn were it not for subsidies. So, blame Washington and the corn lobby for that farkup.

To convert cellulose to glucose (the first step in the process if you want any kind of useful yield at all) you still have to use a homogeneous enzyme. This means it will always be (a) expensive and (b) energy-intensive, regardless of your source. Right now, we could probably convert every bit of green stuff on the planet into ethanol and the return would still be too low to provide enough power for the basic things keeping civilization running like refrigeration and vehicles. It's a decent stopgap for some things that run on portable fuel, but don't mistake that for a real 'solution' to the energy 'problem'.

Tying it to a food crop is, of course, also stupid for different reasons, but the current lack of viability of ethanol on a large scale goes well beyond that. It's not 'fine'.

//Remember, 'replacing coal' is not a relatively small-volume problem like 'replacing gasoline'. Gasoline is a cars problem, which is a relatively small portion of energy consumption and restricted by portability anyhow. With coal, you're talking about fueling the national power grid, which is something else altogether.

//I vote nuclear with a bit of solar tacked on, by the way.

//Mainly because we use oil and coal to make steel and plastics and everything else, not because I have a huge problem with burning them as such.