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Report: Clean Coal Could Create Millions of Jobs |
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President Obama’s economic recovery plan sets aside $50 billion in grants and tax incentives to promote efficient, clean and renewable energy. Several unions are reminding policymakers that the nation already has a huge and available supply of fuel that could be harnessed to provide green jobs and promote energy independence.
The Mine Workers (UMWA), Boilermakers (IBB), Electrical Workers (IBEW) and the AFL-CIO Industrial Union Council (IUC) are aggressively promoting the use of coal-generated electricity to provide jobs and help clean up the environment.
Along with the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, the unions recently released a study showing that using advanced clean coal technologies that capture and safely store carbon dioxide will create millions of high-skilled, high-wage jobs for U.S. workers. Using this “clean coal” technology will reduce carbon dioxide emissions, generate $1 trillion of economic output and create up to 7 million work-years of employment, according to the study.
Speaking at a Washington, D.C., press conference, Bob Baugh, IUC executive director, said (see video):
Our nation needs good jobs and new technology that will cut our carbon emissions. It is time to quit talking about advanced coal technology and begin building it.
You can read the entire study, “Employment and Other Economic Benefits from Advanced Coal Electric Generation with Carbon Capture and Storage,” here.
In a statement, IBEW President Ed Hill said while he supports development of wind and solar power on a large scale:
the only realistic course for our nation is to minimize the carbon emissions from coal generation, which, along with nuclear, will continue to be a vital part of our energy mix for the foreseeable future.
The United States has more coal reserves than Saudi Arabia has oil and we cannot ignore those reserves if we want to make energy independence a reality, says IBB President Newton Jones.
This study demonstrates that it also has the potential to create thousands of good paying jobs….We urge policymakers to keep the results of this study in mind as they move forward in regulating greenhouse gas emissions, and take appropriate steps to encourage the commercialization of [clean coal] technology.
The AFL-CIO strongly backs efforts to combat global warming, achieve energy independence and revitalize American manufacturing in the process. In 2007, the AFL-CIO Executive Council issued a statement that said, in part:
It makes sense to seek energy independence through investments in infrastructure, clean coal/carbon sequestration, advanced technology vehicles and their key components, alternative energy resources (solar, thermal, wind, biomass, etc.) and energy-efficient buildings and appliances. Each of these should be linked to domestic investment and production.
To ensure green jobs are quality jobs, the AFL-CIO has created the Center for Green Jobs. Starting with $1 million from the Working for America Institute, the AFL-CIO’s workforce and economic development arm, the center will partner with affiliated unions to help pave the way for good union jobs in a variety of this country’s unionized and greening industries. The center also will spread the lessons of AFL-CIO affiliates that have successfully joined the green economy, especially in manufacturing.
As UMWA President Cecil Roberts says:
Workers and their families win, the communities where these facilities will be constructed win, and the environment wins. It’s time to get started.
6 Comments
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this would be a great report but for one thing - THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS CLEAN COAL!!!!!
There is no technologically feasible way to remove carbon dioxide emissions from burning coal. That is an absolute, undeniable fact. There have been some small scale experimental tests conducted but nothing has been implemented on the scale of a working coal plant. Similarly, there is no proven technology to sequester carbon. I happen to work at a government agency with people who are studying the potential for carbon sequestration in the US. We are still in the early stages of identifying (on a very coarse scale) the places underground that MIGHT be suitable for sequestration.
We are YEARS away from either of these technologies actually being feasible and the more we dangle such “solutions” out there as viable the more we play into the hands of the corporate coal barons that do not want to give up their power to alternative forms of energy.
If the AFL-CIO and its unions are really concerned about global warming, they would recognize that all the science out there is saying that we need to slash carbon emissions NOW! We cannot wait for these technologies to be developed. There is no more time. The terrestrial ice sheets are melting far faster than scientists had previously thought and we are very possibly looking at sea level rises of at least a meter in the next 20 years or so. If you don’t think that is a lot, talk to people in Florida…
We CAN reduce emissions now through existing technology, conservation, and efficiency, all of which will create millions of jobs. Read the following reports and see for yourself…
http://www.peri.umass.edu/green_recovery
http://www.cows.org/pdf/rp-greenerpathways.pdf
And the Renewable Energy Policy Project gets even more specific with manufacturing jobs created by investments in renewable energy projects
http://www.repp.org/
“…technologies that can capture and safely store carbon dioxide…”
Yes, but can they capture and safely store the toxic runoff that pollutes rivers and the water table? Can they capture and store the debris from the mountain top removal that destroys forests and habitats?
clean coal is an oxymoron. Conservation, energy efficiency, and real green renewable energy should be supported.
Get real, there is no such thing as clean coal!!
I’m all for creating jobs. Especially union jobs! However, we need to create the ability to have truly clean coal and we don’t have that yet. At this point other technologies will provide more immediate and CLEANER results. Lets continue with the research but not jump the gun. Enriching the corporations will create jobs, but at what other costs?
Constructing and installing windmills, solar panels, geothermal pumps, etc., would create jobs too — and not wreck the environment in the course of chasing the mythology of “clean coal”.
Clean coal is of course a myth. However, some things can and should be done to reduce pollution.
I believe the federal government should build a pilot plant to research the technology, not simply give funds to “private” folks to build or not build at their respective whims.
Feds should also build a pilot plant to build “electric” cars and do the basic research. GM and others killed the electric car some years ago and time to get back to doing what has to be done.
It is the job of the government to do things if private concerns cannot or will not address in a cost effective way. That is not socialism, that is a practical way of running a civilized society.