Obama Vs. McCain: Is Clean Coal or Offshore Drilling Worse for the Environment?

Senators Barack Obama and John McCain may want to protect the environment and fight climate change, but they both have to be realistic in a fossil-fuel dependent world. Coal produces 50% of the electricity that we use, and oil heats homes and fuels almost all of the cars on the road today. Both Obama's call for "clean coal" and McCain's support for offshore drilling have come under fire by environmentalists. Here's a rundown of how their respective visions would impact the planet should either of them come to pass.

Short-Term Effects

Obama: Current coal plants are the dirtiest of all fossil fuels, but most of the emissions can be cleaned. Coal mining, strip-mining, mountain-top removal, trucking and burning of coal will continue until carbon capture and storage begins.

McCain: States will individually approve offshore drilling and then exploratory drilling can begin. This may limit expected outputs, particularly in states that are opposed to coastal drilling. Seismic air guns, used in exploratory drilling, are very disruptive to marine wildlife.

Mid-Term Effects

Obama: The United States plans to build more than 100 new coal plants, 85% of which will use old production methods and get grandfathered into emissions limits. Obama's plan caps emissions. This will help reign in emissions, but plants will still be emitting CO2 during construction of these plants, until carbon capture and storage is developed.

McCain: Construction of new infrastructure during this time will be damaging to marine eco-systems and coastal wetlands. The infrastructure, including thousands of miles of pipes, ships transporting oil to land, ports, and refineries, all leak. Transport is responsible for 1/3 of all oil releases.

Long-Term Effects

Obama: Commercial-scale coal plants with carbon capture and storage will not be available until 2025. It's unclear how storage would work, as the first proposed plant is currently on hold. This plan wouldn't reduce fossil fuel dependence but would attempt to produce electricity with fewer emissions.

McCain: When the rigs begin pumping oil, there will be leaks. Heavy metals in the buoyancy tanks leak into the ocean. Excess water generated during pumping is mixed with oil, drilling fluids, arsenic, benzene and other toxic chemicals. A certain level is allowed to be put back in the ocean. It'll be ten years before any oil starts flowing; alternative fuels will be available before you get a drop of oil.

Bottom Line

Both coal and oil are fuels that we need to get away from. But, for the meantime, Obama's plan offers a way to potentially clean up our mess over time (although without weaning us off coal), while McCain offers us a few years of oil that we won't see for another decade (and yet doing nothing to lower prices at the fuel pump nor effectively reducing our dependence on foreign oil). Neither is perfect, but Obama's seems like a smarter strategy. By the time either of these plans go online, however, both Obama and McCain will be long out of office and, more than likely, we'll have found a better fuel source.