In his energy policy as well as his policy on Iraq, John Kerry continues to agree with the Bush administration's basic orientation:
WASHINGTON - U.S. Democratic presidential challenger John Kerry pledged $10 billion over a decade to help U.S. electric utilities find cleaner ways to burn coal, the nation's most abundant energy source.
In a bid to lure votes from coal-producing states like West Virginia, Kerry said that if elected he would offer incentives, like research grants, to encourage utilities to build coal-fired plants that give off almost no pollutants."Coal is abundant, coal mining creates jobs and I believe that with the right investment and commitment coal can be an even cleaner part of America's energy future," Massachusetts senator Kerry said in a statement.
This administration has of course presided over the beginning of not one but two ambitious clean coal programs - the Clean Coal Power Initiative, which Kerry is essentially proposing to expand (good luck! progress with this initiative, like so many other important energy policy priorities, has been the victim of the political wrangling over the Energy Bill), and the more futuristic (because it has 'future' in the title) and ambitious FutureGen project, which aims to develop a integrated coal-fired combined electricity and hydrogen generation plant with advanced carbon sequestration technologies by 2010.
Kerry's promise to increase funding for clean coal is certainly a welcome reminder for undecidedish voters like myself that Kerry is a reasonable man that, despite the fervent hopes of the most irrational Bush-opposers (I hesitate to call them Kerry supporters) and eco-authoritarians, is not going to fuck around with this administration's sensible policy agendas beyond the usual Democrat tendency to use more government funding instead of private investment for these kinds of projects. Will try and post later with further comparisons between the Kerry and Bush energy plans, which are really quite similar in most regards - if the Energy Bill (which included support for just about all the policies Kerry advocates) had passed, there would be practically nothing to argue about.