The Clean Coal Carolers

This is for real, The American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity has produced a flash video of Christmas Carol singing lumps of coal singing familiar cheery holiday melodies with words extolling the use of coal to produce energy.
The interactive site which involves dressing up the coal lumps for wintry weather is, how can I say this, uhmmm, awesome.
Granted, the coal industry is an American way of life for thousands of miners. The processing and shipping of coal, the burning of the coal to produce energy are all intrinsicaly entwined in our nations economic life. There are legions of lobbyists who work hard to keep it that way. Just like the tobacco lobby, but heck, we broke the tobacco habit. The cultivation of tobacco is slowly being phased out because the demand just isn't there and the export markets are beginning to wise up as well.
It's true that much progress has been made in scrubbing coal...and producing less dangerous emissions when it is burnt, but don't let the propaganda fool you. The reduction in emissions is pretty small compared to what is still poured into the atmosphere when it is burnt as a fuel.
Coal is a finite resource and the mining becomes more and more invasive as the easliy obtained resources run out.
That is why I am excited about Barack Obama's appointment of Dr.Steven Chu as the head of the Department of Energy. Chu is a Nobel Prize winning physicist and Director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory where he ahs been involved in pushing breakthrough research in atomic, solar and biofuel technology.

This past summer, Dr. Chu spoke at the National Clean Energy Summit in Las Vegas, convened by the Center for American Progress, UNLV, and Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV). In one of the lighter moments during his remarks, Chu claimed that efficiency gains and lowered costs have been shown to be possible when the jobs were assigned to engineers, not lobbyists. Chu also laid out in stark terms the climate crisis that we now face:

"Consider this. There’s about a 50 percent chance, the climate experts tell us, that in this century we will go up in temperature by three degrees Centigrade. Now, three degrees Centigrade doesn’t seem a lot to you, that’s 11° F. Chicago changes by 30° F in half a day. But 5° C means that … it’s the difference between where we are today and where we were in the last ice age. What did that mean? Canada, the United States down to Ohio and Pennsylvania, was covered in ice year round.

Five degrees Centigrade.

So think about what 5° C will mean going the other way. A very different world. So if you’d want that for your kids and grandkids, we can continue what we’re doing. Climate change of that scale will cause enormous resource wars, over water, arable land, and massive population displacements. We’re not talking about ten thousand people. We’re not talking about ten million people, we’re talking about hundreds of millions to billions of people being flooded out, permanently."

It's pretty refreshing at this late date to see a reality based serious proponent of enviromently safe energy alternatives in a major goverment position. maybe this is the last encore for the caroling coal lumps.