You all know the saying, 'you can put lipstick and a fancy dress on a pig, but all you get is a made up dressed up pig.' This is exactly what Senate Republicans (and a few Democrats) did yesterday in introducing their new "clean energy plan", which essentially gives tax breaks to coal burning plants that use carbon sequestration (pumping CO2 into the ground) as a way to label themselves as clean. The problem with this method of burning coal is that it is still burning coal, which is a dirty, outdated, and expensive way to generate electricity.

The Detroit Free Press has a story here about the plan.

 Not only is the price of burning coal steadily on the rise, so is the price of building a new coal plant, which one has to believe is the reasoning behind this move by Sen. Mike Bishop and others in the Senate, to pave the way for more coal plants in Michigan.

Couple the incredibly high cost of new coal plants (as much as twice as expensive as wind power and four times as expensive as energy efficiency) with the fact that carbon sequestration is a completely unproven technology that has never been proven on a commercial scale, it's hard to envision how the drafters of this plan can call it clean.

Coal is coal, regardless of how you burn it. Michigan has a chance to be a leader in renewable energy and energy efficiency before even thinking about building new coal plants. Let's hope that the policy experts in Lansing see this proposal for what it really is, just lipstick on a pig.