Greenpeace

Here's a funny one for ya: The picture above is just one of several billboards that greeted me on my journey to my sister's house in Pittsburgh last weekend. They all extolled the clean and green credentials of coal and some even noted that the dirtiest fuel around had received no bailout money (not true- $3.4 billion in the economic stimulus package was set aside for CCS).

But what I am wondering about here is what exactly do we mean by clean? I ask because as I drove into Pittsburgh, an area dependent on this "cleaner, greener" coal, I drove by another sign- an air quality alert board informing me that the air for that day in the city was unhealthy to breathe. That certainly doesn't jive with my definition of clean but perhaps the coal industry is using a different metric.

New out today is a Greenpeace briefing that should temper the enthusiasm behind the notion that those companies and countries behind current and future CO2 storage projects have everything under control. As you may already know, CO2 storage is one of the key components of CCS- an unproven technology that claims to make coal safe for the climate.

The briefing, titled Reality Check on Carbon Storage illustrates that a wide range of issues regarding the safety, efficacy and permanency of carbon dioxide storage remain unresolved. Unfortunately, these critical knowledge gaps have not stopped governments from committing hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayers' money to support the development of CCS.Oh, and never mind the fact that CCS won't be ready before 2020. Governments seem hell bent on proving CCS so they can keep burning coal, regardless of the cost.

Coal is dirty. There is no getting around it. The hype in recent years around "clean coal" amounts to little more than a greenwash campaign from an industry responsible for climate change, mercury poisoning, asthma and a number of other health and environmental effects.

This month, I am embarking on a trek to document the damage caused by this dirty energy source. I will be taking you along on my journey so that you can see for yourself how coal is harming people and the planet.

My trip will take me to Australia, China, Indonesia and Thailand. The cost of coal in these countries was revealed last year with the release of Greenpeace's report, True Cost of Coal. My visits are intended as a follow up to that report as I will be visiting the very same areas to see how the struggle against coal continues.

So stay tuned! You'll hear more from me in a minute.