Mounting costs slow the push for clean coal

For years, scientists have had a straightforward idea for taming global warming. They want to take the carbon dioxide that spews from coal-burning power plants and pump it back into the ground.

President George W. Bush is for it, and indeed has spent years talking up the virtues of "clean coal." All three candidates to succeed him favor the approach. So do many other members of Congress. Coal companies are for it. Many environmentalists favor it. Utility executives are practically begging for the technology.

But it has become clear in recent months that the nation's effort to develop the technique is lagging badly.

In January, the government canceled its support for what was supposed to be a showcase project, a plant at a carefully chosen site in Illinois where there was coal, access to the power grid, and soil underfoot that backers said could hold the carbon dioxide for eons.

Perhaps worse, in the last few months, utility projects in Florida, West Virginia, Ohio, Minnesota and Washington State that would have made it easier to capture carbon dioxide have all been canceled or thrown into regulatory limbo.

Coal is abundant and cheap, assuring that it will continue to be used. But the failure to start building, testing, tweaking and perfecting carbon capture and storage means that developing the technology may come too late to make coal compatible with limiting global warming.

"It's a total mess," said Daniel Kammen, director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley.

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Plans to combat global warming generally assume that continued use of coal for power plants is unavoidable for at least several decades. Therefore, starting as early as 2020, forecasters assume that carbon dioxide emitted by new power plants will have to be captured and stored underground, to cut down on the amount of global-warming gases in the atmosphere.

Yet, simple as the idea may sound, considerable research is still needed to be certain the technique would be safe, effective and affordable.
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This is exactly why I have criticized and will continue to criticize the presidential candidates. They are lying to the American people about this. All of them have given campaign stump speeches intimating that this technology is already perfected and only a couple of years away.They use this lie to validate the fact thar they will allow coal companies to continue to spew their toxic and climate change causing garbage into our atmosphere for the next twenty years without real penalty under the guise of a "cap and trade" system that I am almost certain will be manipulated to benefit them.

We don't need carbon sequestration, and i personally believe it would be detrimental to underground water systems and acquifers. What we need is AGGRESSIVE action regarding bringing solar, wind, and other alternate energies to market.

I feel as though I type this over and over and over again, and still see nothing happening. We have deserts in this country that could hold enough solar arrays on them to power the homes of hundreds of thousands of people, and here they sit in Congress and on the campaign trail talking about "clean coal."

Like nuclear plants and desalination plants, carbon sequestration is a risky expensive bandaid to allow busniness as usual with the illusion of moral courage. That is all. I will not believe this Congress is serious about tackling climate change until they stand up to these toxic industries to wean us OFF of them and give the people what they want and what this planet must have in order to adequately sustain us and our children: CLEAN, affordable, SAFE alternate energies.