G20 Pittsburgh summit

Coal conference on the fringes of G20 summit

Article published on the 2009-09-22 Latest update 2009-09-22 16:13 TU

(Credit: Wikipedia)

As world leaders are meeting for the G20 summit in Pittsburgh later this week, Exxon and other major energy suppliers are sponsoring a coal conference on Monday with 26 researchers from 26 countries to talk about clean coal as energy. The conference, with keynote speaker Grange Morgan, the head of policy for Pittsburgh Carnegie Mellon University, is being touted as "America's fuel for America's future".

"Technology can reduce its impact on the climate," Morgan told RFI on Monday.

Morgan said that the US currently generates about half of all of its energy from coal, and that coal plays a similar sort of role in many countries throughout the world.

"We need to clearly reduce carbon emission by 80 per cent by the middle of the century," he sad. "I don't see how to get there from here without coal being part of a portfolio of low carbon technology. And there are ways to eliminate the emissions of ccarbon from coal," he said.

Raina Rippel, the director of the Center for Coalfield Justice, disagrees. "Yes, coal does account for a large percentage of electricity used today... but long wall mining [involves] massive seams of coal that are being pulled out of the earth in panels and there is nothing left to support the earth," she said.

Rippel made a specific case for Pittsburgh, which used to be a major mining town. She spoke of sinkholes due to lack of support in the earth, which destroys homes, damages roles and cracks streambeds.

"There is no guarantee that anything ont he surface is going to remain intact after long wall mining passes through. It takes away other economic alternatives, such as farming," she added.