Q for Courage
New Congressman Mike Quigley showed courage by speaking the hard truth about coal that you don't often hear from Illinois politicians. "Nothing about coal is clean." I spotted the video at Progress Illinois.
I don't mind the coal industry researching carbon capture technology but it's disappointing to see billions of taxpayer dollars wasted on the FutureGen pipe-dream instead of real energy solutions.
The Illinois Chamber of Commerce was pushing a bill for the state to subsidize coal research and facilities, including pipelines for carbon transfer. It failed this year but you can be sure that the coal industry will keep coming back to the trough for more handouts beyond the billion dollars they just got from the US Department of Energy.
FutureGen may be located in Mattoon Illinois with a population of 18,290. If the $1.073 billion in federal stimulus dollars targeted to FutureGen were simply given to the residents of Mattoon, every man, woman and child whould get about $58,663 each. I'd take the money and skip the experiments.
Comments
They could use the future gen money to put photovoltaics on every roof in that county. Several counties actually... unfortunately you would have to contract with germany or china to get that large of an order delivered anytime soon, as all the US companies future orders are already filled. There are not enough viable companies in the US at this time.
Corporations and industries should pay their own R & D costs or at least almost all of it. The taxpayer should not have to foot the bill that provides them no profit.
Posted by: beth adams | June 16, 2009 11:32 AM