Environmentalist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. lit into President Obama's support of "clean coal" yesterday, calling the president a "great man" but also an "indentured servant" of the coal industry.
Obama has proposed $3.4 billion for further research on clean coal projects. The theory of "clean coal" is that the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, which is released into the atmosphere when coal is burned, can be captured. Billions of dollars have been spent in the past 24 years to find a way to make the clean coal dream come true, but so far there are still no plants operating using any such technology. Former VP Al Gore has been particularly dismissive of the idea of clean coal, and at last year's Clinton Global Initiative, said, "How many such plants are there? Zero. How many blueprints? Zero." Kennedy and Gore are joined in the anti-clean coal movement by the filmmaking Coen Brothers who have produced a couple of funny commercials on the subject; see one of them here:
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