Noticias
y campañas
de la OCA
en español
Hillary Clinton has been pilloried for pandering to working class voters with her gas-tax holiday proposal. But she's not the only one telling working-class voters what they want to hear.
"Barack Obama believes in clean Kentucky coal." So reads a direct mailer being distributed in Kentucky ahead of the state's May 20 primary. (Click the image to the right for a larger version.)
Clark Stevens, press secretary for the Obama campaign in Kentucky, confirmed that the mailer came from the campaign. "Yes, it is an official mailer," he said.
Does Obama really believe in "clean Kentucky coal"?
"Clean coal" typically refers to coal burned in Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle (IGCC) plants with operational carbon capture and storage (CCS) facilities to bury the plant's greenhouse-gas emissions underground. There are no IGCC plants in Kentucky, and no operational CCS facilities. Technically, there is no "clean Kentucky coal."
There is one IGCC plant proposed for the state, but it hasn't yet broken ground. Most experts predict that widescale carbon sequestration is still a decade away (PDF).
The Obama campaign has made it clear that they want no new coal plants in the meantime. Jason Grumet, a top Obama energy adviser, told Grist that "the policies we have already articulated make [coal plants without CCS] economically unrealistic." He went further on a recent panel sponsored by the Society of Environmental Journalists:
Given that CCS is a decade away, it follows that Obama's policies would amount to a suspension of commercial coal-plant construction for the duration of his term, whether it's four or eight years, excluding publicly funded demonstration projects like FutureGen. That would allow for little growth in Kentucky coal, unless it started shipping its coal overseas (as of 2006, 80 percent -- $2 billion worth -- was exported [clarification: "exported" to other states, not overseas]).
Full Story: http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/5/5/1694/63422?source=daily
