“The climate conversation rarely pauses to ask why the scrubber success is treated as invisible. One reason is rhetorical convenience: once the entire fuel is defined as the problem, partial technological answers become unwelcome.”
In the climate debate, coal is treated as if it still belches the same smoke it did in 1970. This is a major error. Modern coal plants combine a variety of technologies before and after combustion, as well as monitoring systems to verify compliance with today’s environmental laws with criteria pollutants (see Appendix A). As with petroleum, coal today is an environmental product, part of the increasing sustainability of fossil fuels.
Scrubbers, selective catalytic reduction, and the rest of the air-pollution control suite (see Appendix B) are rarely mentioned. That silence is not neutral. It erases one of the clearest engineering successes of the past thirty years and flattens a complicated fuel into a single villain.…