By Beth Starkin, PepperDigital
As a nation, we’ve become fixated on clean energy, which is a good thing. But for most of us, that means biofuels, solar, wind and maybe a little hydro. In a departure from this, President Obama announced yesterday that coal will be a significant piece of the clean energy puzzle. While it’s true that coal will never be truly clean, in making this announcement, the President has brought attention to an important subject – that there is no silver bullet solution to our quest for clean energy, and finding ways to improve what we’ve already got will be just as important as finding alternatives.
All too often, our society focuses on the new “bright shiny object” of the day, fixating on the promising, yet unproven, new technology that offers the hope of clean, American-made power. And in this fervor, the tried-and-true, but boring technology gets all but ignored. The problem is that with new technology comes roadblocks and problems, and this has created a view that clean energy is decades away from being a fully viable, when the reality is that clean, American-sourced options are here today.
Adding fuel to the fire is that many of the companies behind the advances in cleaning up dirty technology won’t talk about it, because they are afraid of how what they are doing will be perceived among environmentalists. But if we’re going to solve our energy problems now, and not 10 years from now, they are going to have to take a page from Obama’s book, and start talking about how these technologies play in the clean energy mix and why they make sense for us to use today. The planet will benefit, and so will their business.
