Green Leaf Report

Image via Wikipedia

I’ve visited a couple of different college campuses recently, recruiting entry level engineers.  At a recent campus visit, I was impressed at the environmental credentials of many of the interviewees.  Candidate after candidate described his or her environmental projects, experiences installing residential wind turbines or solar panels, and on and on.  One student had completed multiple internships measuring local air quality for government projects.  I got the feeling during the interview that he expected me to have more answers.  He asked me what I thought about the haze hanging over the state, the way local coal plants were allowed to pollute because the local governments were so concerned over job loss if the plants left, the horrors of mountaintop mining.  He would pause and stare at me, waiting for me to provide a solution, perhaps.

About half way through the interview, I started to ask him if he had spoken with the woman interviewing in the room next to us.  She worked on the air quality monitors in coal plants. What a perfect fit, in my mind.  Take a person who cares about the pollution coming out of coal plants, and set that guy to work putting better filters in place, injecting carbon waste into the ground, working on more responsible processes and practices that the rest of us haven’t thought of yet.  Maybe he’s someone who could make clean coal happen, at least of the consumption side, if not on the processing site (but stop mountaintop mining anyway!)

I don’t know if he’ll follow through on it, but I did get him an interview with the woman in the room next to me, and he came back later and spoke with her.  So for everyone else, let’s move away from coal. For those with the right knowledge base and idealism, please clean up that fossil fuel process, while we work on getting alternative energy replacements in place.