Clean Coal

When first opening each website in their own different windows, I noticed that the “This is Reality” site seemed much more interesting than “America’s Power.”

Though I initially had no interest in clean coal, I began scanning through the more interactive “This is Reality” website where they keep giving facts about the faults in clean coal. Knowing that coal is a fossil fuel that gives off many gases that are harmful to the environment, I could only see myself agreeing with the facts being presented in front of me. The site gave many reasons why coal burning is harmful, and even revealed that even after all of the advertising of clean coal, there’s not one power plant that stores its global warming pollution. They talk about how we need to invest more in solar, geothermal, and wind sources because they are not only efficient, but are renewable sources that do not emit the CO2 that burning coal does. These facts appeal to logos right away after the comment about there not being any plants that use the CC as claimed.

Flipping over to “America’s Power,” I was presented with reasons why coal is good for us. They try right away to appeal to the every day person and how they use electricity for video games, tv, and charging cell phones, so that we can’t say we aren’t indirectly using the coal ourselves. Tons of numbers are thrown around to make it seem as though things were being done to make our lives better with the use of coal. It is easy to even see a more localized view of how much coal energy is used by state so that we can more easily relate the how much coal we really use. There’s a fun little game where you can provide power to your house using different means of energy sources and the run different kinds of common household items. This serves to appeal to the logic of how using coal would give us more energy than any other source.

Both sites appeal to the average person in that they are trying to get us to use logic to reason with them. Many environmental councils and federations sponsor “This is Reality,” which to me seems as though they may be leaving things out, because to me these people always seem a little radical in their views, and not too much was said that I couldn’t have already guessed. “America’s Power” was set up in more of a legit looking website that appealed to me more and seemed more credible rather than a website that I could’ve put together. Overall, I would have to say that “America’s Power” seemed more like it was explaining to me facts with things to back up their claims as “This is Reality” just seemed like a website that Joe Dirt made because he doesn’t like power plants to burn coal.