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From the CO2 standpoint their all wrong. No one has ever shown and been approved by the whole "modern" science that CO2 can in any way raise the global temperatures of the earth. From a dirty coal emission regarding most particulates, we already have by law the particulate collection systems in place for most all coal burning electrical power generation plants.... grant you some say in Virginia are not included....but mostly nation wide this has been in place for a number of years. And that includes things like Sulfuric Acid emissions. The only factor remaining on the environmentalist agenda, correct me if I am miss informed, is the issue with what level on average a coal burning electric power plant produces in the very minute quantities of mercury, measured in parts per billion.
This whole issue on coal has been treated out of hand, and given free reign by the EPA and their drivers on the left, and goodie enviro groups to hog tie the industry.
So be careful with the Carbon Dioxide part of the equation relating to burning coal for electrical production.
Mercury in the minute amounts emitted, yes can be a valid issue, but then we get into the current go around, where some show the EPA standards are not being violated, verse those that claim no matter how small the emissions, they are a health risk. I don't know for sure if I sort of addressed your comments. Sorry if I did not.

This whole issue on coal has been treated out of hand, and given free reign by the EPA and their drivers on the left, and goodie enviro groups to hog tie the industry.

I've advocated for a long time that there is no such thing as "clean coal" because with a plant in service today there is not "dirty coal". They use precipitators, low nox burners, scrubbers, and/or low sulfur coal. They tune combustion and monitor it to the nth degree.

I don't believe mercury to be the threat the left portrays. There is a lot of research that has shown environmental mercury to have been higher in the past. Coal contains so little mercury that you can take sample after sample to find just a trace of it. It doesn't show up in chemical analysis done by plants who sample their coal continuously. They have to burn tons of it to emit just a trace. If it is in the coal in traces, it was in the environment once before and we are returning just a little bit of that which was locked in coal since we can't burn all the coal for the next 500 years. My point is, it is so little and it is dispersed globally. It is nothing.

The left has added CO2 as a "pollutant" to make the case that coal is dirty. They use the term to conjure up images of dirty fatherless 12 year old boys with black lung working the underground mines in 1900. These conditions do not exist outside of the plants and mines, and inside the mines they barely exist. Additionally, nobody has been forced to work in a coal mine, they do it willingly for the money.

Dirty coal is nothing but a political BS argument.