Thursday, December 4, 2008

Al Gore with Sideburns


When it comes to music, Elvis is the King. When it comes to the environmental movement, that helm is held by Al Gore, Mr. Inconvenient Truth. 

Al sent out a Twitter today about a new Web site, thisisreality.org/. It's about clean coal. Or unclean coal. But that's not as catchy a slogan. 

The site urges people to "Join our Reality Corps and help make sure misleading articles and false statements about coal don’t go unanswered." Sadly, many journalists don't know the difference between spin and science. They are so tied to the old school "quote both sides" mantra that they don't stop to think of separating truth from tale. 

Let me start. First of all, there is a such thing as clean(er) coal. If you use gasification, basically controlling for pollutants before you burn the lumps, you can cut emissions. Not clean, but cleaner. 

You also can sequester the CO2. Not perfect, but better than the old pulverized coal burning we've all come to know (cough) and love. But calling it clean, like calling it green, doesn't make it so. 

So the Reality Corps. video you see on the site is a little off, a little slanted. Sure, we should all strive to increase alternative energy use in the world, but we also need to realize (Al) that we can't change overnight. And my computer won't run without baseload power. That's coal, or (safe) nuclear, for now. 

Then again, Elvis wasn't perfect either. If you don't believe me, see "Charro."


1 comment:

Kristina said...

I heard a great interview with Christiane Amanpour talking about reporting on the Bosninan genocide and how there actually were victims vs. aggressors and it was not a case of creating "false balance" by saying "this side says this and the other side says that." Bravo to Christiane, Green Mullet and Al.