Obama Disappoints Me By Backing Clean Coal and Ethanol

Clean Coal and Ethanol Won't Help.Biofuels and Clean Coal. That is where Obama will be putting his energy as far as clean energy.

Can someone get me a vomit bag?

I’ve been ranting  the last few days- I’m blown away by the direction that Obama is taking on clean energy. Not that clean/ green/ sustainable/ etc. energy was ever a big part of his platform or anything, but come on, Mr. President. The idea of pursuing clean coal is absurd. It’s like saying you’ll drink a glass of water everytime you take a shot at the bar- sure, it helps for the hangover but you’re still drinking just as much. You’re not changing your habit- you’re just adding another one.

And with the recent controversy between the Air Resources Board in California and the ethanol industry, well, I’m not convinced anymore that ethanol is even much different on the emissions it creates than regular fuel. Sure, it uses corn, but do we really need to be using more corn? Growing more monocultured corn to run our cars? If the U.S. government is requiring more ethanol to be in our fuel, that means we have to start growing more corn. And growing lots of corn is not all that friendly for the Earth, ends up sending a lot of pesticides and whatnot into the rivers near the cornfields, and does the long-term damage of taking the diversity of the cropland away. In addition, the California ARB is finding that when you count the indirect GHG’s from producing ethanol it’s about the same as fuel that does not contain ethanol- so really, what’s the point? And now that I’ve just ranted about ethanol, I acknowledge that Obama said biofuels. But you know he means ethanol.

Obama is talking big: "America can win the race to build a clean energy economy, but we're going to have to overcome the weight of our own politics. We have to focus not so much on those narrow areas where we disagree, but on the broad areas where we agree.”

Overcome your own politics, Obama, and stop pushing the technologies that don’t do anything to solve the problem.

He wants 10 commercial demonstration projects up and running by 2016 for clean coal carbon capture. Lame! Take that money and put it into designing solar panels that can be put on every single building in the United States. Then they won’t NEED the energy from burning coal.

And then the idea is to produce 36 billion gallons of biofuels a year by 2022. Right now we make 12 billion gallons a year, almost all of it corn ethanol. Lame squared!

"By 2022, we will more than double the amount of biofuels we produce to 36 billion gallons, which will decrease our dependence on foreign oil by hundreds of millions of barrels per year," Obama said.

This is a political move- to appease the coal industry and the farm industry. It makes me sick. Neither of these options is going to even make a dent. They’re distractions- and precisely at the time when we should be making big, world-changing moves.

Photo Credit: Roberto Rizzato (via Flikcr under CCL)