A new ad being run by a coalition of environmental groups is pointing out the dirty truth of clean coal...it doesn't exist.

The coal industry's exciting advertisements (see below) that claim that we've made coal into a clean source of power have gone unquestioned (except by folks like me) until now. The coal industry ad below actually showed a 3D rendering of a zero-emissions coal plant that had already been scrapped because of skyrocketing costs. Frankly, it's about time we called them out.

Of course, it's sparked off a gigantic controversy in which the coal industry is pretending like somehow they're the underdog, going up against these megalithic environmental groups. Who do you think has more money, organizations funded out of charity, or companies funded by creating half of the electricity in America. Hmmmm.

A representative of the coal industry started swinging blindly at the ad, attempting to hit every base in the aresenal agains the environment. In this article at the Charleston Daily Mail, he says that these insane liberals are just looking down their noses at the south, points out that they all ride in private jets all the time anyway, wonders whether we want America powered by Saudi oil, blames environmentalists for the deterioration of the economy, calls global warming a myth, and then caps it all off by saying that he's not at all upset about it, "Would we be upset if Osama Bin Laden was critical of us?"

Good lord!

The truest thing he says is that we're criticizing them without providing any alternatives. And, frankly, there aren't any alternatives today that can eliminate our dependence on coal. But that doesn't change the fact that the coal industry is calling itself clean while all of their proposed technologies are farther from reality than renewables like solar or wind.

There are several gigawatts of solar and wind online throughout the world. There are zero gigawatts of clean coal online. It's not clean...and while I support any efforts to make it clean, whether it's using the carbon to create useful materials, burying it underground, or using algae to turn it into biofuel, they're going to have to actually demonstrate the technology before they start pretending like coal is clean.

Just when you thought that engineers have run out of ideas for harvesting power from mundane human activity, a scientist from Texas A&M invents a piezoelectric material that can turn sound waves into electricity. His idea? Stick it in a cell phone.

Piezoelectric materials generate an electric voltage when subjected to some sort of mechanical stress. When you read about harvesting energy from footsteps or dancing, for example, piezoelectrics are involved. What’s novel about this application is that it exploits nanoscale piezoelectric properties. When such a material is precisely between 20 and 23 nanometers thick, it can capture 100% more energy.

Such a size makes this material perfect to stick into a cell phone. The sound waves emitted by the phone (as well as, presumably, those emitted by its owner) exert stress on the material, which in turn generates electricity. Obviously, energy can’t be generated from nowhere. But if it can simply be absorbed from the environment, you could have – for all intents and purposes – a self-charging device.

Via Science Daily