The most dangerous and pernicious lie ever to be told is that “clean coal” [search] exists as a climate mitigation strategy. There are only a handful of working efforts that sequester carbon emissions from the oil industry, which troublingly allows more oil to be retrieved. And there has been a few tentative prototype efforts to bury and store coal plant emissions, but nothing of scale or production ready. Carbon emissions stored may not remain in place permanently, nor be done economically.

Yet on the basis of illusory, untested technologies that may or may not work and companies and governments are unwilling to fund [ark], the coal industry amazingly portrays itself as green. Thus centuries of treating the atmosphere as a waste dump continues. Survival of the human species and their habitat requires that no new coal plants that emit into the atmosphere are built, and existing ones closed down as soon as possible, if an operable atospheric system is to be maintained.