Obama’s Rope-Line Debate on Coal

If you suddenly came face to face with President Barack Obama, what would you say?

Gillian Caldwell found herself in that position earlier this month when she encountered the president on a rope-line. Caldwell — the leader of the climate-action group 1Sky — decided to debate the president over his position on coal.

As she shook Obama’s hand, Caldwell appealed to him to stop supporting federal investments in “clean coal” and to put the money instead into renewable energy. To his credit, Obama stopped long enough to engage. Here are excerpts of their exchange:

Caldwell: It’s got to be renewable energy. No more clean coal. It’s a unicorn. It doesn’t exist.


Obama: I disagree with you. … We are not going to get all our energy from wind and solar in the next 20 years.


Caldwell: Let the market do it. … Can’t the market make the investment?


Obama: They can’t do it. The technology’s not there. I’ve got a nuclear physicist in my Department of Energy who cares more about climate change than anyone, and he will tell you you can’t get it done just with that — so you’ve got to have a transition period to do all this other stuff. Don’t be stubborn about it. … If I could do it all with wind and solar, I would! We can ramp it up. That’s what we’re working on.

Obama made his case for coal more formally in his State of the Union address, where he called for more investment in carbon capture and sequestration (CCS). In an energy policy meeting with governors at the White House on Feb. 3, the president said:

"One of the things that we’re going to be talking about today is investing in the kind of technologies that will allow us to use coal, our most bountiful natural resource here in the United States, without polluting our planet. It’s been said that the United States is the Saudi Arabia of coal. … If we can develop the technology to capture the carbon pollution released by coal, it can create jobs and provide energy well into the future."

The president then announced that he’s created a Carbon Capture and Storage Task Force charged with figuring out how to deploy coal burning on a “widespread scale” within 10 years.

As the dirtiest and the most abundant of fossil fuels, coal is a dangerous bridge to a clean energy economy. How has the president who vowed to restore America’s leadership on climate change become coal’s First Friend?

One explanation may be the advice he is receiving from his inner circle — Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, press secretary Robert Gibbs and presidential advisors David Axelrod and Valerie Jarrett, political savants who may assume that expedient politics is the same as good public policy. According to an analysis by Edward Luce in the Financial Times, Obama may be relying on these four advisors far more than he listens to his talented Cabinet, including Energy Secretary Steven Chu. None of the four is an energy expert, and it shows in Obama’s position on coal.

For example, if our objective is jobs, renewable energy technologies have been found to produce more than fossil fuels. Coal is not our “most bountiful natural resource”. Assuming the president was referring to energy resources, that honor goes to sunlight. We have a 7 billion-year supply. The fuel is free and we don’t have to blow the tops off of mountains to get it. Collecting sunlight doesn’t kill rivers, contaminate groundwater, make people sick or destroy their culture, as is happening today, every day, in the rape of Appalachia. We don’t have to capture the sun’s greenhouse gas emissions because it doesn’t produce any. So if abundance, cost, jobs and low carbon are our criteria, then the money we’re dumping into coal should be invested in pre-fossilized solar energy.