As six miners are trapped in a collapsed coal mine ABC “World News Tonight with Charles Gibson” took it the opportunity to kick the coal industry while it was down – but this time in the name of global warming.
“The criticism of coal is that it’s a dirty energy source. Although many of the pollutants are being scrubbed out – it’s still high in carbon, the greenhouse gas blamed for global warming. The industry is promising some new expensive technology to remove that carbon.” said ABC correspondent David Kerley on August 8
Even though the coal industry has made strides in the last 15 years to curb emissions, the report used an agenda-driven journalist, Jeff Goodell, author of “Big Coal: The Dirty Secret Behind America’s Energy Future,” to make the case against coal.
“‘Clean coal’ is something like fat-free doughnuts. It’s something, that we would all sort of like to believe in and sounds good. But, in fact is just a kind of a, uh – advertising slogan,” Goodell said.
An advertising slogan? Some scientists would disagree.
“There are many opportunities for enhancing the performance of coal plants in a carbon-constrained world – higher efficiency generation, perhaps through new materials; novel approaches to gasification, CO2 capture, and oxygen separation; and advanced system concepts, perhaps guided by a new generation of simulation tools,” said Dr. Ernest J. Moniz, a physicist at MIT. Moniz was not quoted by “World News."
Goodell, offered as a coal industry expert by ABC, lacks the scientific credentials to make expert claims about coal. He is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone and a contributor to The New York Times Magazine, Air
