Call coal's bluff; develop alternatives

Clean coal is the future. Americans hear that constantly from the electricity industry, which spends countless millions on commercials and to sway Washington.

If that's so, why is the industry building so many old-style power plants?

According to an Associated Press examination, since 2008 the American electricity industry has built, or is building, more than 30 conventional coal-fired power plants.

That represents the fastest pace of growth in decades and comes as the nation becomes ever more aware of the high costs - environmental, medical, social - that coal exacts from people who live downwind or anyplace else.

The expansion also comes as the industry continues to tout so-called "clean coal" - a term of art for technologies to capture or mitigate the amount of carbon dioxide released in combustion. Except that those technologies remain years from deployment. So in the meantime, power companies will make electricity the old-fashioned way.

Coal's problems aren't new. When burned, it releases carcinogens, heavy metals and other toxins into the atmosphere. Mercury fouls the waterways where it falls, making fish dangerous to eat. Particulates in smoke get into people's lungs, making it hard to breathe and even to live. Mining coal is a dangerous business. It kills people underground and destroys ecosystems on the surface.

Like all fossil fuels, burning coal releases carbon dioxide, which helps warm the atmosphere. The 32 power plants that have been approved or built since 2008 will generate 125 million tons of greenhouse gases each year, about the same as 22 million cars.

Despite that, though, America needs coal. More precisely, America needs electricity, and coal is a plentiful and cheap way of making it. But since power companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a power plant only if they expect it to keep humming for decades, such old-fashioned coal plants are likely to be with us long after cleaner, wiser alternatives are available.

Some we know well. Nuclear power, for example. Hydroelectricity. Solar. Wind. Tidal. Thermal. Some technologies aren't even a glimmer in a laboratory. All of them are likely to be more expensive than coal but promise far less damage to the planet.

Coal's patrons have bet $35 billion in new construction that Washington won't make them truly pay for the environmental or social or health damage their industry causes. They're betting that the nation won't get serious about ending a dangerous and damaging addiction to fossil fuels. Their money's on Americans continuing to use as much electricity as they can, regardless of where it comes from.