Earlier today we had to remove a greenwashing ad from our Google ads over there on the right. The link took me to a clean coal "greenwashing" site and we just won't put up with it.

Coal is a very dirty fuel. Depending on the type coal can be anywhere from 60% to 90% carbon ... all of which becomes CO2 upon burning. Sulfur is the largest contaminant by volume but most coal contains between 1ppm and 13ppm uranium along with similar amounts of thorium. Oh, and lets not forget the mercury in there, too.

The coal burning operations in the United States are already as clean as they're going to get, capturing fly ash with scrubbers. I don't believe any of them have CO2 sequestration methods in place and even if they did where in the world would they put it all? Exhuming and rebury carbon so we can continue using a legacy energy industry makes no sense when there are unexploited renewables everywhere.

The Chinese people face an even worse situation than we face here - their coal plants lack scrubbers. Given their coal consumption they're putting a few tons of bomb grade uranium into the air every year along with about 100x the amount of the less radioactive U238. The fly ash goes up, up, up into the atmosphere and if a U238 atom encounters a free neutron from a cosmic ray shower we get ... plutonium.

OK, got it? Coal = bad, no matter how much their marketing weasels might squirm about trying to change perceptions.