Human Rights Day and a dirty argument

December 10, 5:26 PMDC Corporate Ethics ExaminerJim Cunningham

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Click for "Clean Coal" propaganda presentation.

Human Rights Day is celebrated worldwide on December 10th. Started in 1950 to commemorate the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), the day is now generally used as opportunity to ask our leaders to refocus their attention on current atrocities and focus the world’s attention on countries with very poor records of human rights violations.

The Declaration arose directly from the experience of the Second World War and represents the first global expression of rights to which all human beings are inherently entitled.”

Even at a very local level people are drawing attention to very current issues closest to them with grassroots efforts like "Day Without a Gay", designed to demonstrate the size, power and potential impact of the gay community.

Today, I’d like to do my part by pointing out the fallacy of the argument over “clean coal.” There is a, rather pointless in my view, debate over whether coal can be clean and, therefore, should be a priority as an energy source. The coal industry has even had the gall to release a Christmas themed propaganda video showing lumps of coal singing about how great clean coal supposedly is. (this being a serious issue, I will leave the jokes about lumps of coal in stockings to other writers) Environmentalists argue that clean coal technology exists in theory but not in practice in the United States. Still, this misses the point.

On this Human Rights Day, I submit that the relative cleanliness of coal is irrelevant when you consider the lives lost in coal mine disasters. How can it be that in 2008, in what we would like to think of as a civilized, modern society, people are putting their lives in danger every day so we can burn fossil fuels? Regardless of the existence, or not, of clean coal technology, coal will never be clean as long as it has blood on its hands.