Clay's Blog

The Fraudulent Attack on “Clean Coal”
Have They Been to Stanton?

Have you seen the ads that are blanketing TV attacking the coal industry? Produced by something called the Reality Coalition, they specifically seek to discredit the idea of “clean coal,” a term much bandied about in the recent Presidential election. You can watch the ad at www.action.thisisreality.org. I think the coalition’s purpose is to “teach” the American public that there is no such thing as clean coal; that no clean coal technology is really in development; and that if we want to survive we have to shut down the coal industry.

The ad is tremendously powerful.
The ad really offends me. It should offend you too.
North Dakota and the energy industry need to respond intelligently and forcefully. An soon.

In the 30-second video, a plant engineer stands before a coal power plant. He’s young, earnest, a little geeky. He’s wearing a white shirt and holding a clipboard. He’s a briskly efficient professional man. He offers to take you on a tour of a “state of the art clean coal facility.” But when you walk through the door of the gray corrugated steel façade, you don’t in fact enter a power plant. You are instantly back outside in an industrial wasteland. The tour guide has to shout to be heard, and like a robot, he keeps repeating the phrase “clean coal technology” as he venerated the very concept.

While he shouts out his love of coal, admitting--as if it were a minor consideration—that burning coal is “one of the leading causes of global warming,” we are not looking at him but rather at the countryside which he is walking us through. “Take a good long look!” he says, while he squats in a yellow-gray blighted landscape on which nothing will ever grow again.

The land in every direction looks like the smoothed out surface of the Moon or a bleached out Mars, except that it is dotted with some blasted shrubs—mere barren sticks in the ashy ground—with just the slightest hint of green in the shrubs that cling closest to the ground. Message: this is the amount of life the earth can support if you license any more coal power generation plants.

Then a black screen appears on your TV with the words, “In reality there’s no such thing as clean coal.” Leaving aside its truth value, the Reality Coalition ad is an extremely well made and effective piece of television, and I believe it is going to have an enormous national impact. When I saw it for the first time, paying that half-attention that we have developed as a way of coping with commercial tele vision, I thought for an instant that it was an ad actually produced by the coal industry. You know, one of those “we’re doing good things for you,” ads you see in the ag and oil industry campaigns.
Here’s the hidden message of the video, the “contribution” of this environmental coalition—with close ties to Al Gore—to the energy debate. “These coal guys are destroying the planet earth. Don’t believe what they tell you. They are out of touch with reality.”

Choosing the actor who played the coal engineer was a stroke of genius. He’s a good-looking guy, and he’s clearly a serious believer in coal, not a PR pretty boy. The producers hired one of those hair restoration ad guys who look terrific when they are wearing a hat, and like the actor-director Ron Howard when they aren’t. Later in the ad, when he’s wearing his hardhat, the engineer looks good—and young. But at the start of the ad, when he’s holding his hardhat in his hand standing in front of the Entrance to the Future, he looks much older and much less healthy. With his prominent nose, bony forehead, and sunken eyes, with his pale skin and darkened lips, he looks, in fact, cadaverous. The subliminal message here is that he is one of the living dead—and of course he is in this instance the “national representativeD of the coal industry. He’s offering to lead you to the Land of Death.

The Reality Coalition would deny this analysis, of course, and insist that I’m “reading into” the video text in a way they never intended. You be the judge. If there were a freedom of information act for media companies that cater to advocacy groups (from the NRA and the Christian Coalition to the Reality Coalition) and we could see the internal correspondence and memos, we’d all be appalled and fascinated at the same time.

It’s time we differentiate routine television ads from what might be called “ad videos.” Ad: Ginsu Knives or credit counseling. Ad video: the sensuous little “film projects in miniature,” that stand on their own as sophisticated creative acts, at times works of art, and only indirectly sell some sort of product. You’ve seen them for the hippest foreign cars or Coca Cola.

We need a serious national conversation about our energy future. This ad does not contribute to that conversation. It cheapens it. In fact, it prevents it. It takes reason and good sense off of the table. It does not deliver its promise of “Reality .” It manufactures a gothic dystopia in which the truth is deliberately distorted to short-circuit the debate we need to have about coal and our energy consumption habits. It fundamentally derails the discussion by appealing not to our heads but to the deepest of all human urges—the urge to survive. The message of the ad belongs to the category of false logic known as “false dilemma.” It offers you this choice with nothing in between: coal = death of the planet; stop burning coal = the planet gets to live.

That the ad is deliberately misleading is perfectly clear to anyone who has ever studied the data or driven through the energy crescent in North Dakota. The landscape in coal country is not blighted. The rolling hills of North Dakota’s coal country are covered with grain and grass, as often as not with bold sunflowers. The natural contours of the landscape between Washburn and the badlands are especially beautiful. The Missouri River flows with serene majesty right next to some of the power plants. Even they, if the truth be told, in some light and from some angles have a kind of industrial beauty. This is not T.S. Eliot’s wasteland. If the folks who made this ad visited North Dakota and spent a few days in the countryside that surrounds our seven coal plants, I wonder what “defense” they would craft to justify their naked piece of propaganda.

Coal has its problems, but it is undeniable that we need coal for the foreseeable future. We Americans are carbon hogs. We consume a quarter of the world’s oil, coal, and natural gas even though we are just 5% of the world population. Unless we are prepared to engage in a fundamental revolution in our way of life, we’re going to need to continue to power our civilization with carbon fuels. Coal is an essential element of the carbon equation, partly because it is so abundant, and partly because we have all the coal we need right here in the United States. In other words, it’s a natural security issue in an era of perceived energy scarcity and religious fundamentalism.

If the coal industry shut down one power plant per week for the next two years, the electrical grid would collapse (as it did in California in 2006). Within a few months the American people would by crying: “Burn anything you want with or without scrubbers. Just give us back our power.” And by the way, the industry does not mine coal and burn coal for the fun of it. There is a demand for power. Coal fills part of that demand. It’s a classical moment out of Adam Smith. Characterizing a basic and unglamorous industry vital to our daily happiness as some sort of dastardly leviathan with plans to destroy the planet is profoundly reckless and disingenuous. In fact, it9s obscene.
That said, in spite of some industry claims, coal is not a panacea. It’s a bulky, dirty form of carbon, expensive to transport, and when it is burned, it emits things that are profoundly unhealthy: carbon dioxide, sulphur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, mercury, fly ash, particulates. We need to keep pushing the coal industry to find and adopt “clean coal technologies.” Great progress has been made. More will come, if we keep our focus, and remember that these technologies can only be adopted if they are affordable.

We need a thoughtful, well-informed national dialogue about the future of energy: coal, oil, natural gas, wind, nuclear, hydrogen, biofuels. We need the environmental community to be a central voice in that debate. We need the environmental community and concerned citizens to raise tough questions about effluents, mining techniques and reclamation, and regulatory compliance. I am particularly worried about air quality here in North Dakota. But how can the environmental community (or at least this coalition) be expected to be taken seriously if it refuses to debate with integrity?
We also need to have a very sober, look-into-the-mirror, discussion of the energy and environmental implications of our way of life. If we want to continue to live at this level of material opulence and conspicuous consumption, with our SUV’s lined up in Wal-Mart parking lots next to trucks filled with merchandise manufactured in China, the earth is going to take a hit. Al Gore is right about that, and he’s a very valuable figure in the global environmental debate, if he will just agree to play responsibly.
Back in September, former Vice president Gore said, at a global environmental rally, “If you’re a young person looking at the future of this planet . . . I believe we have reached the stage where it is time for civil disobedience to prevent the construction of new coal plants that do not have carbon capture and sequestration.”

This is a man who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007? Gore’s remarks were irresponsible, and it should trouble all of us that he has attempted to turn young people against their parents and grandparents as we enter a difficult period in the history of energy development and distribution.

I think the North Dakota legislature, which is about to convene, should issue a resolution of dismay reading something like this: “North Dakota is coal country. That gives us a good understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of coal fired power plants. We welcome a thoughtful national debate about the=2 0future of our energy needs. These ads are a sad and deliberately misleading caricature. Propaganda cannot help us create a sensible and environmentally responsible energy future.”

I think the energy industry needs to hire the best video production company in the world to make a series of ads that explain the truth about coal. 1. Coal is not a very clean fuel, but we absolutely need it for the foreseeable future or we cannot continue to live the way we do. 2. Coal is not clean, but it is cleaner than you think and the technology (some of it pioneered by the Energy & Environmental Research Center at UND) is getting better every day. 3. It is quite possible that if industry and government work together, with scientists, environmentalists, landowners, and accountants all at the table with equal voices, we can come close to solving this problem. 4. Besides, China is the real issue. China is building one new coal power plant per week and their industry is often lightly and sometimes un-regulated. The United States with its wealth and technological ingenuity, is likely to solve its problem. China and India and Russia are going to cause the gravest environmental stresses of the 21st century.

Clay Jenkinson

Last Things Matter

November 2008 By Clay S. Jenkinson

On Wednesday I went up to the bluffs just west of Bismarck State College to watch the final two spans of Memorial Bridge come down. The implosion was scheduled for 10 a.m. It actually occurred a few minutes after 11.

A quiet crowd of more than 1,000 was strung out along the ridgeline. Some people stayed in their cars, more stood or sat on the prairie grasses sipping coffee out of high-end Styrofoam cups. There were a dozen or so boats in the water half a mile upriver from the bridge, including a red canoe. The minute I saw it, I wished that I had taken my kayak down to the river in the morning and witnessed the bridge come down from the water's surface. A couple of folks were standing like sentinels on a slender sandbar in the center of the river. How I envied them.

I was surprised and pleased that so many people came to watch the last gasp of Memorial Bridge. Implosions always draw a crowd, I suppose. The mood was festive in a muted sort of way. I tried to reckon what percentage of the crowd felt sad to see the venerable old bridge spans collapse into the river. Not many, I think. It was more about spectacle than loss.

BSCPresident Larry Skogen had invited folks to watch the implosion from the splendid new energy building on campus. The view from the fourth floor is magnificent. Both of our colleges, BSC and the University of Mary, have buildings with spectacular views of the Missouri River. That is incalculably important in the education of our youth - as important to the spirit of our place as the neoclassical colonnades are to the spirit of the University of Virginia at Charlottesville.

However much the Missouri has been compromised and degraded by industrialization, it is still - even in its Corps of Engineers straitjacket - one of America's greatest rivers. Not even the notorious Flood Control Act of 1944 and the Pick-Sloan Plan, which threw up six giant mainstem dams between Fort Peck, Mont., and the bottom of South Dakota, could quite destroy the romance of the Missouri River or its extraordinary heritage. North Dakota is fortunate to be bisected by what Meriwether Lewis called "the mighty and heretofore deemed endless Missouri River," even in its domesticated state. Try to imagine North Dakota without it.

When John Steinbeck came through in 1960 in his pickup camper Rosinante, doing the field work that led to "Travels with Charley," he instantly recognized the importance of the Missouri River. "Someone must have told me about the Missouri River at Bismarck, North Dakota," he wrote, "or I must have read about it. In either case, I hadn't paid attention. I came on it in amazement. Here is where the map should fold. Here is the boundary between east and west. On the Bismarck side it is eastern landscape, eastern grass, with the look and smell of eastern America. Across the Missouri on the Mandan side, it is pure west, with brown grass and water scorings and small outcrops. The two sides of the river might well be a thousand miles apart."

Sarcasts put it more rudely in my youth: "Mandan, where the West begins, and the East dumps its garbage." I have always loved Mandan, mostly because it is not Bismarck.

Memorial Bridge was the arched symbol of Steinbeck's line of demarcation. It was, with our unique Capitol building, the most widely recognized landmark in Bismarck. The three more recent highway bridges at Bismarck are efficient and structurally sound, but essentially invisible. You can cross them without really thinking about what you are doing, because they do not scare you or make odd humming noises or call attention to their engineering. Memorial Bridge was a kind of clunky 20th century exclamation mark that said: "Hey, pay attention, you are now crossing one of America's major rivers, and it wasn't easy to build a crossing here, so don't ever take the Missouri River for granted."

Those days are now gone forever.

When I got to the energy building, I hesitated a second too long at the door, and discovered that I actually had no interest in going inside. I didn't want even a remarkable 18-foot-high pane of glass to stand between me and the bridge. Besides, it was just about as beautiful a late fall day as I have ever seen - 50 degrees (above!), a gentle breeze, a dry, breathtakingly clear sky, crisp as Halloween time generally is. It was jacket weather, just this side of chilly. It just felt glorious to be alive on such a morning, and everyone who gathered on the ridge knew: Not much longer now.

By Wednesday morning, I had long since come to terms with the fact that Memorial Bridge was going to be erased from the Bismarck-Mandan landscape. Like many others, I hated to see it go, because it so thoroughly represents my idea of Bismarck. Until the other day, it had never not been there, in the whole course of my life.

I believe the bridge should have been preserved as a monument to our past - the Capitol will be obsolete one of these days too, but I bet it will not be imploded to make way for some gleaming State Bank of North Dakota-like building. At least one span of Memorial Bridge should have been lovingly placed on a river ridge, like the old threshing machines that punctuate our lost homesteads. Or parked downtown as a pedestrian plaza, the way the old "Biggest Little City in the World" signs are preserved on Reno's back streets. But there was no sufficient public outcry to save the bridge - or a chunk of it - and everyone understood the structural challenges it presented to those who maintain our infrastructure.

I made my peace with the loss of Memorial Bridge on the last day it was open for traffic, July 31. I drove across it twice that morning, half an hour before traffic engineers closed it, and I walked across it from east to west and back again. Only a handful of people walked the bridge that day, though hundreds queued up to make their last drive across the bridge, which opened for traffic in August 1922.

Still, I feel great loss, in a very personal way, the way one feels when one of the Beatles dies or a venerable president or movie star from the golden age of film. I can remember in my youth riding in the back of our Ford Falcon from Dickinson to my grandparents' farm in Fergus Falls, Minn. In my childhood the only way to get there was old Highway 10. The Memorial Bridge was the only way across the Missouri in this part of the world. It still had its steel mesh roadbed then - which frightened but fascinated my sister and me, and just frightened my phobic father. The hum of the car's tires on the bridge delighted us. Crossing the great bridge was an event then, a marker of the progress of our journey, perhaps because we were not in the back seat fumbling with iPods and Nintendo DS.

I am feeling old today. Some of my spans are showing signs of fatigue.

Rest in peace, Memorial Bridge. You will be much missed.