“Clean” Coal = Filtered Cigarettes: Death in Disguise

We’ve seen it before: death cast as safety.

Once (or more) upon a time, in the way-back 1950s, Big Tobacco was caught in a lie: cigarettes don’t cause cancer, they said, until the science and the death toll proved otherwise.

And—miracle of miracles!—a simple solution, a techno gadget, a cure-it-all pill: just slap on a filter and everything’s safe!

It worked as intended: the filters removed a smidgen of tar, and just enough nicotine to dull the rush but not the addiction. Users couldn’t get enough, and sales soared.

It worked as intended: they sold us counterfeit safety that we wanted to believe—and the deaths continued apace.

Yesterday’s filtered cigarettes are today’s “clean” coal. It’s tempting to believe in business as usual, but science now knows that fossil fuels simply aren’t safe. Like filters on cigarettes, slapped-on carbon capture removes just enough poison to soothe worries—while stoking dependence, pumping corporate profits, and killing us just as dead in the end.

To be fair, there’s a place for carbon capture technology in combating climate change. And we’re gonna need it, if only because we’ve dumped so much carbon already that we’ll likely need to remove what’s already in the air. But we can’t use it to perpetuate and only meagerly offset deadly industrial combustion when we have all the safe technology that we need for a clean-energy future.

There’s generational fairness too. Casting blame backwards—to our parents, grandparents, or forebears who smoked or farmed tobacco or mined the coal that built our industry—is muddled, misguided, and moot.

But the lives at stake are the next generation, the problem is the product not the users, and we well know the naked truth.

All coal kills.

Our climate and our children live on borrowed time.

Stop coal. Now.