US Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz (right, foreground) gets a tour of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, via the ORNL Flickr page
Last week, President Obama delivered a surprisingly aggressive speech on climate change and the environment. "Power plants can still dump unlimited amounts of carbon pollution into the air for free. That's not right, it's not safe, and it needs to stop," said Obama, a bold enough statement that our Brian Merchant wrote that it was the moment that Obama officially declared war on coal.Merchant wasn't the only one to see things that way. After blowback from the coal industry, US Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz defended Obama's plan by saying that it's far from a war on coal, and that the US expects to rely on coal for a long time into the future.
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From a Reuters report:Obama "expects fossil fuels, and coal specifically, to remain a significant contributor for some time," Moniz told Reuters in Vienna, where he was to attend a nuclear security conference.This statement is partly Moniz (and, by proxy, Obama) being realistic: Even with a huge push towards renewables, it's going to take a long time to wean our massively fossil fuel dependent country off of them.The way the U.S. administration is "looking at it is: what does it take for us to do to make coal part of a low carbon future," he said, adding this would include higher efficiency plants and new ways of utilizing coal.It is "all about having, in fact, coal as part of that future," Moniz said. "I don't believe it is a 'war on coal'."This is where things get weird. Last week the president still took a bold course and declared the climate a priority. (It's sad that saying what we already know can be considered a bold move, but that's politics these days.) Now the energy secretary says that Obama is still a fan of coal, no matter how much he talks about the climate, which is completely contradictory. Sure, from a pragmatic standpoint, coal will still be a parrt of our energy spectrum for years to come. But hyping clean coal is little more than political pandering.There's no such thing as clean coal, and the fact that the phrase is still exceedingly common in politics just goes to show how far from reality the political arena can get. What's actually happening? The coal industry is fading, especially during the natural gas boom, and renewables are continuing to grow. Regardless of what Obama says, those trends will continue.
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