alt Hacker NewsPeople laugh at this, but anthracite genuinely is cleaner than other coal in every regard save CO2 emissions. People just think it's a joke because they've come to believe that CO2 is the only coal emission worth caring about, which definitely isn't true.
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"Clean coal" is like saying "a fast snail". Sure it can be faster than other snails, but even if it's twice as fast as the second fastest snail, it's still a snail and I'll still laugh when an ant runs circles around it.
No, the criticism isn't because people get caught up about CO2 -- it's because "cleaner than other coal" is a very low bar to meet to be calling something "clean" full stop.
Also "clean coal" is not a type of coal being burnt (although that does matter too) but pollution control systems added to coal plants.
The oxymoronic term "clean coal" refers to carbon-capture-and-storage (CCS) technology [0], touted by the fossil fuel industry as a way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and continue employing coal workers.
Thus far, it is incredibly expensive, at a time when solar and wind generation is cost-competitive with fossil-fuel plants which don't employ CCS. It is simply a dead end. You can generate more renewable energy, and store it, for far less than it takes to equip and operate CCS in conjunction with a fossil-fuel-fired plant. Only direct government subsidy makes it viable for a vanishingly small amount of GHG emissions.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_capture_and_storage