What makes clean coal ‘clean’: A rhetorical look
What does clean coal mean? What makes a wind farm clean, or a coal plant dirty? When is nuclear power, or shale gas, dirty, or clean? The concept of cleanliness plays a fundamental role in discussion of energy technologies.
But the concept of ‘clean’ in relation to energy production is problematic: all forms of power production create pollution of some kind.
In energy policy, there’s a simplified sliding scale from clean(est) to dirty(est). According to the rhetoric of energy, renewable technologies sit at one end, and traditional fossil fuels at the other. But it gets a bit more complex than that.
Sometimes, less polluting traditional fossil fuels like natural gas are described as clean, as gas has around half the emissions of unabated coal. But the fuel still accounted for20 percent of global emissions in 2010.
Meanwhile, the US National Mining Association claims new ‘clean coal’ plants will emit 90 percent less pollutants than the coal power stations of the 1970s. Even so, this clean coal will still be a highly polluting power source.
Nuclear power famously produces problematic nuclear waste. But with the focus now on greenhouse gas emissions as the most important form of pollution, nuclear is enjoying a new identity as a clean technology.
Even renewable technologies are not without pollution problems: siting onshore wind farms on pristine peat bog can release CO2; hydropower can have a negative impact upon aquatic ecosystems; and there is the oft-mentioned visual impact of wind turbines. But do these make renewables ‘dirty’? And if not, why not?
Rigid designators
To understand what’s going on here in rhetorical terms, let’s turn to a rhetorical construct called a ‘rigid designator’; a linguistic term coined by philosopher and linguist Saul Kripke.
Language is important to how we view the world, but its connection to reality is subjective and changeable. The theory goes that words (or ‘signifiers’) float around in ideological space until they become attached to a master-signifier – a word that appears to give associated words their meaning. The meaning of the words then depends entirely upon the master-signifier, which pins the floating words together.
Make sense? How about the practical example: In this case, the master signifier is ‘clean’. The words (or ‘floating signifiers’) that rely on ‘clean’ to get their meaning include ‘clean coal’, ‘nuclear’, ‘natural gas’, ‘renewable technologies’ and ‘non-polluting’.
The master-signifier unifies the signifiers to create what Slavoj Žižek calls an ideology. In this case, it’s the concept of ‘clean energy’. Clean becomes a word that does not refer to anything in the real world, but only to the other signifiers.
As a rigid designator, ‘clean’ cannot be held to account in the real world: it has no properties outside of the words it pins. So in discourse on energy production, ‘clean’ can give meaning to ‘clean coal’, ‘nuclear’, ‘natural gas’, renewable technologies’ and so on, and they in turn are defined by the rhetoric of ‘clean’. Its means of functioning is tautological and self-perpetuating.
‘Clean energy’ as an ideology
But if these concepts are getting meaning from each other, how do we assess which energy sources are clean or dirty? And by what criteria?
Repeatedly using the rigid designator in politics and industry is what gives ‘clean energy’ the appearance of having internal logical consistency. In other words, it sounds authoritative because it is spoken by those in authority.
How can this happen?
This is how technologies that are cleaner than ordinary fossil fuels can be presented as non-polluting. If we return to the sliding scale mentioned above and consider how the act of classification works, we could group clean coal, gas and nuclear alongside renewables as ‘clean energy sources’.
These technologies – and their advocates – can borrow the language of renewable technologies in order to tap into the narrative of non-pollution. This is possible because they all share in the rigid designator, ‘clean’.
As such, because renewable technologies are identified as ‘clean energy sources’, using the same language to talk about coal, natural gas and nuclear taps into this same designation of ‘non-polluting’.
The Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI) uses the ‘clean’ rhetoric to promote nuclear power as environmentally friendly. The NEI website says: “Nuclear energy is America’s largest source of clean-air, carbon-free electricity”. Clean Energy America calls nuclear “a clean, reliable and affordable source of energy”.
Coal gets a similar treatment. The American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE) website says the organisation is “committed to a clean energy future with coal”, and the company Clean Coal Technologies Incorporated even uses ‘Pristine’ as a brand name for its fuel products.
But interestingly, renewable energy industry tends to use the adjectives ‘renewable’ or ‘sustainable’, while ‘clean’ appears mostly in a political context – if at all. The Renewable Energy Corporation (REC) describes the source of solar energy as clean rather than its production. TheNational Renewable Energy Laboratory‘s (NREL) website has the tagline: ‘Leading clean energy innovation’, and the US Department of Energy website talks about ‘clean, renewable energy’.
On the whole, clean coal, gas and nuclear industries are keen to tap into the rhetoric of non-pollution through the use of ‘clean’, whereas renewables are less inclined. Arguably, because they have less to prove they have less need for the rigid designator.
How clean is ‘clean’?
Use of the ‘clean’ rigid designator has led to some notable results. For example, in the mainstream debate in the UK and US, the acceptable measure of cleanliness is carbon emissions, which lets nuclear energy be repositioned as ‘clean’. If this is the only measure, then this is not unreasonable.
It is important to note the black and white framing of ‘clean’ and ‘dirty’. By assessing cleanliness solely in terms of carbon emissions, a complex issue is diminished to a single, reductive strand that does not account for pollution outside of its either/or frame; the problem of nuclear waste, for example, or visual pollution.
The natural gas industry uses this frame to improve on the fossil fuel image of conventional and unconventional gas, primarily with the use of the adjective ‘cleanest’. Shale gas is called “the cleanest fossil fuel” by Shale Gas Europe, and “the cleanest burning hydrocarbon” by the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP).
In the case of clean coal, environmental groups and other commentators are working to expose the rigid designator. For example, the Coen Brothers recently made a TV advert on the subject: “clean coal harnesses the awesome power of the word ‘clean’!”. And the Quit Coal website states:
“Clean coal is a myth created by marketing, advertising and public relations experts to try and convince the US public that the dirtiest source of power in their country is somehow environmentally friendly.”
The rigid designator is a powerful rhetorical tool used to great effect in the ideology of ‘clean’ energy, and has little to do with how polluting a given means of energy production actually is. To challenge this ideology, the rigid designator at its heart must be exposed.
Further reading:
Žižek, S. (1989)The Sublime Object of Ideology, Verso: London.
Kripke, S. (1980)Naming and Necessity, Harvard UP: Cambridge, Mass.
Photo: Creative Commons