I think the first time I ever heard the word ‘greenwashing’ was in the late ’80s or maybe early ’90s after I saw a flier from McDonald’s about how they didn’t use beef from the Amazon. I brought the flier home to show my mother, an environmentalist, because I was so proud to show her that even big giant companies were doing good things and that her work was really making a difference.

She looked at it for about three seconds and told me “that’s greenwashing.” She explained the word to me and although I was sad to see my evidence of the mainstream adoption of environmentalism debunked, I realized for the first time that in a lot of ways claiming to “go green” when you’re not can be worse than just doing bad stuff in the first place.

Well, I’ve obviously come a long way since then and you may have already seen one of our “Greenwash of the Week” posts.

You’d think I would be pretty aware of the scope and quantity of greenwashing out there. I thought I was too.

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I woke up this morning to the sight of a coal train rumbling below my window and the image of a shiny new ‘clean coal’ billboard fresh in my mind. I’m here in Pittsburgh for the 7th Annual Carbon Capture and Sequestration conference to present RAN’s perspective on CCS - which, for those anyone with any remaining doubt, is that CCS is too expensive, dangerous, experimental and energy intensive to be a real solution to the climate crisis and that we have better options. My panel was moderated by NRDC’s David Hawkins who set the tone by summarizing Greenpeace’s fantastic report on CCS: False Hope (released today) - David’s message to the industry reps and academics crowding the room was that although he doesn’t agree with most of the report conclusions himself - they had better damn well get to know the environmental arguments because they’re going to have to deal with us whether they like it or not. Faint praise indeed, but to his credit I was set up nicely for my own presentation.

You see, the striking thing about this conference is how the proponents of CCS are, how can I say this delicately, their own worse enemies. More or less every presenter has agreed that the technology is expensive, that there are tremendous uncertainties, that liability is an issue, leakage is likely and safety is a concern. So my talk was nothing new until the part where I said that my team and I wake up every morning thinking about how to shut down all the remaining coal plants on the books. Because here’s the thing: CCS proponents look at the long list of problems with the technology and see it all being overcome by massive taxpayer subsidies to cover R&D, liability and increased electricity rates. We look at the long list of problems, and we add the oft overlooked fact that (surprise!) the coal itself has to come from somewhere and we see: a dead end.

Today’s article in the Wall Street Journal “Coal Doubters Block New Wave of Coal Plants” paints a pretty grim picture of the fate coal — even (gasp) so-called ‘clean coal’ - pointing to a recent recommendation by a Minnesota public utilities commission hearing judge to reject buying electricity from a proposed coal gasification plant capable of capturing carbon because it would double energy costs to consumers. Finally, the excessively high costs of clean coal gets a little air-time!

From coast to coast, plans for a new generation of coal-fired power plants are falling by the wayside as states conclude that conventional coal plants are too dirty to build and the cost of cleaner plants is too high.

The article even goes on to point out that the banks have started to sit up and take notice that coal might just not be quite the best investment:

In the wake of the fading coal proposals, and others that are expected to follow, Citigroup downgraded the stocks of coal-mining companies last week, noting that “prophesies of a new wave of coal-fired generation have vaporized.” On Monday, Steve Leer, chief executive of Arch Coal Inc., said some of the power plants he had expected to be built “may get stalled due to the uncertainty over climate concerns.”

We can’t rest on our laurels though — building “cleaner coal” plants may be ridiculously expensive, but if we’re going to keep old plants on life-support instead, that’s no solution either. Nor is nuclear (obviously) — even on a pure economic accounting. Natural Gas? Sure, it’s cleaner, but do I hear the sound of billions of dollars being spent on infrastructure that will be absolutely obsolete within our lifetimes? (When the gas runs out I suppose we could use the pipelines to transport…..uhhh….Kool Aid?) Why not shuffle all that money on over to efficiency and renewables starting now?