Subscribe to Common Dreams News Updates
Most Popular This Week
Popular content
Today's Top News
Obama Eyes Biofuels, Clean Coal in New Climate Push
WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama announced new measures
to reduce greenhouse gas emissions with "clean coal" technology on
Wednesday in his latest move to keep climate change at the top of the
country's political agenda. The administration also outlined a strategy to boost biofuels
production, seeking to nudge the country toward energy independence
while balancing the environmental costs of grain-based motor fuels. The moves are part of Obama's effort to gain more votes for a
climate bill stalled in the Senate that will seek to boost production
of clean, low-carbon energy and help the country reduce its dependence
on imported fossil fuels. The climate bill faces further obstacles after the election last
month in Massachusetts that gave Republicans a Senate seat long held by
Democrats, depriving the president's party of 60 votes that could
overcome procedural hurdles. "Today I'm announcing a carbon capture and storage task force that
will be charged with ... figuring out how we can deploy affordable
clean coal technology," on a wide spread scale within 10 years, Obama
said during a meeting with a handful of state governors at the White
House. "We want to get up 10 commercial demonstration projects -- get those up and running by 2016." Carbon capture and storage is meant to capture the emissions from
carbon-polluting coal plants and bury them underground rather than
spewing them into the atmosphere but the technology is still in the
process of being researched. BIOFUELS The biofuels strategy, which also aims to boost jobs as the country
faces double-digit unemployment, is laid out in a report by the
Biofuels Interagency Working Group, a body the president established to
help spur investment in biofuels and make the industry more
environmentally friendly. The goal is straightforward: getting the country on track to meet a
congressional goal of producing 36 billion gallons (136 billion liters)
of biofuels a year by 2022. "This is a substantial goal, but one that the U.S. can meet or beat.
However, past performance and business as usual will not get us there,"
the report said. The United States is far away from its target now, currently producing 12 billion gallons per year, mostly from corn ethanol. The report offers solutions that would iron out problems in getting
ethanol from producers in the U.S. Midwest to consumers near the coasts. Such snags include filling stations that have been slow to adopt
pumps to distribute a fuel blend that is mostly ethanol, called E85,
and a lack of dedicated pipelines for biofuels. In addition, loan guarantees for ethanol plants could be targeted
more effectively to support new biofuels plants, the report said. The president is pushing for the United States to overhaul its
energy habits by switching to less-polluting fuels and reducing its
dependence on foreign oil. The departments of agriculture and energy and the Environmental
Protection Agency will work together to create a regional supply chain
to make sure all parts of the country will make biofuels markets more
robust, the report said. (Additional reporting by Tom Doggett; Editing by bill Trott)
- Posted in
42 Comments so far
Show AllBiofuels could get a strong push if the USA would stop exporting grains to other countries.
Any drop in import revenues could be offset by attacking third world countries with rice-powered drones.
the problem of the allergy to energy for others is the residue of universal misery
edweg
Corn-ethanol is a financial boondoggle with many planned refineries canceled, others closing, and attempts at consolidation collapsing as creditors are unwilling to finance what amounts to "farming" government subsidies, which is the only way such refineries can be "profitable." "Clean-Coal" is an oxymoron and also just another vehicle to harvest tax-dollars.
The grand chimera is "energy independence." The only way that can occur is through local production and distribution of electricity via decentralized renewable methods--combined with drasticly lowered energy use. But since Big Energy controls government and media, it will continue to block the only avenue for salvation as it excludes them from profiting.
This Reuters piece has been scrubbed, too.
Obama's reference to "clean" nuclear energy is missing.
How is it even remotely possible to make the argument that nuclear power is "clean"?
When radioactive waste is destructive to human health virtually FOREVER, that's not anyone's definition of clean.
Obama needs to do a little bit of homework on his own and stop listening to all those industry lobbyists!
Either that or he could ask some Green activists?
Say, Van Jones, for example?
Biofuels is great but government needs to subsidize switch grass instead of corn.
http://news.mongabay.com/2008/0107-switchgrass.html
Read it and join the efforts to push for subsidizing it in place of corn.
You mean Hemp.
Hemp would be useful as diesel. To my knowledge, there is no processing it for gasoline engine vehicles. The prohibition on hemp is the main obstacle to clear before research and development on hemp can get off the ground.
I hate 'news' stories - they wander around, hit a couple points of interest, and then stop with no summary or conclusion or ending.
The '60 in the Senate' thing is now considered a myth. Also, it's irrelevant, really, since a) the Dems can't/won't function regardless of numbers, b) no-one pays much attention to BO, and C) lack of cooperation between Congress and the Administration doesn't matter because BO's proposals are usually crap anyway. Maybe he counts on this opposition so that he won't have to actually accomplish anything whatsoever that helps people or the earth.
Ideas and proposals coming out of the DC bubble are so reliably useless that I have to wonder at the actual value of biofuels.
As for burying fossil-fueled power plant emissions, hey! I know! Put it in the sand beside the nuclear waste and BO's head (where he's had it for a year now).
clean coal and biofuels?
Its too bad solar, wind, geothermal, etc, don't have the kind of mega-corporate backing that coal and agriculture have, or the administration might consider them worthy of green funding too. I guess we'll just leave those developments to the Chinese, and purchase their products when these ideas fail. Right about now, Van Jones has got to be glad he's no longer their green advisor. This has 'lipstick on a pig' written all over it.
All of the alternative energy technologies, collectively, including solar, geothermal, biomass, wind, nuclear ad nauseam, can't meet more than a fraction of the energy supplied by oil and other hydrocarbons.
They also can't replace the tens of thousands of consumer products made out of oil and other hydrocarbon based polymers.
We are looking into a very deep dark hole that our descendants will have to live in.
hogwash, the only reason renewable energy (RE) can only supply a fraction of the E supplied by oil is that we only devote a tiny fraction of our available resources to the development of such sources (and what effort we do spend is on shitty sources like nukes or "clean coal" or biofuels). We are essentially starting from zero, all of our efforts to this point being a comparative drop in the bucket. If we were to actually make a concerted effort to develope RE sources such as that we used to make oil our chief source of energy, it would be very little problem at all. Your statement is a self-fulfilling prophecy as very little effort expended on anything will produce just that, very little.
Solar, wind, biomass, geothermal and other alternative technologies have had at least forty years worth of R&D, plus millions of dollars over the years of consumer level spending. A massive push now to get more 'alt energy' systems in place will only use up the resources needed to make these technologies even faster.
The selenium for solar panels, rare earths (with the single largest source in China) for exotic batteries and magnets for the wind, hydro, and geothermal systems, plus the common metals of copper and aluminum for wiring and casings, oil based carbon fiber for lightweight high efficiency windmill turbines, exotic alloy metals for high sped hydro turbines... the list explodes exponentially... all are in increasingly short supply.
And the most vital resource of all, OIL, is already a catalyst for warfare and international intrigue. And the machines and processes that make the alt energy systems available use hydrocarbon fuels at a ferocious pace, as well as devouring a staggering share in their own creation.
The various energy concerns knew all of this years ago, and instead of cutting back on their consumption, roared ahead in their blind hunger for profit at any cost.
I would highly suggest you look up 'Jevons Paradox'. William Jevons was a steam engineer who discovered the more efficient you made a machine in a quest to preserve a dwindling fuel supply, the faster you deplete it because more people use the more efficient machine, and build more powerful machines based on the efficiency improvements. We are living out his prediction.
Wishing for a techno-fetishist fix to be handed to you is still feeding into the system that will end up crashing anyway. It is not defeatist to be heading for the lifeboats when the Titanic is sinking. That's simple self-preservation. As much as I enjoy the self-limited benefits of technological society (I do not own a cellphone, drive a car, or watch much TV for example), I know how to grow or forage my own food, build a house, make low tech tools and weapons, pilot a boat, and basic first aid. I routinely carry an assortment of emergency basics on my daily commute, knowing how little it would take to throw the entire system into complete collapse and chaos. Would you call that defeatist, or pragmatic?
Galenwainwright,
It doesn't matter what it costs to do alternative energy. The cost argument is moot, because the alternative is extinction. Why can't we demand that government subsidize Residential Solar in the Southern States? This is where most of the dirty coal power plants are anyway. I mean, we subsidize unprofitable war don't we? We subsidize BigAg Frankenfood and Biofuel don't we?
Some time ago, First Solar, I believe, had an "aluminum foil"l solar panel that you could tape anywhere. On a wall or on your roof, it was so light and flexible you could install it anywhere yourself. Big Oil and Big Coal, no doubt have killed it, but it could provide all of our daytime power requirements. Add a mandate that consumers get paid to pump Kilowatts onto the grid, like in California, and it could also help the middle class get back on it's feet.
Instead of bailing out banks on the next round, let's let them go broke and spend a trillion on Residential Solar Grants instead.
Demand it.
TJ
"All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent." - Thomas Jefferson
Galenwainwright:
If the world economy collapses, I am not sure your survivalist skills will be enough to save you. There will be hungry people out there, armed, who will take your tomatoes and potatoes and everything else you raise. Better to do what we can to stave off the collapse through conserving what we have and through retooling our energy infrastructure. Population decline, which is already beginning in some parts of the world, holds forth the hope that we can get past this difficult time for our species and our planet.
Clinton, Bush, and Obama will go down in history as the worst presidents in American History assuming any of us are still left in a 100 years from now.
Actually, I see it as a collective starting with Reagan/Bush and likely including the poor sap who gets selected to replace Obama. But we must also include Congress, Big Business, the Duopoly, and the citizenry itself as presidents don't operate in a vacuum.
I am a veteran journalist, laid off in January 2009 after nine years as an editor with the New York Law Journal. I ask that you view my new site http://dons-review-law-politics-science-philosophy.com for more information from Michael C. Ruppert's book “Confronting the Collapse: The Crisis of Energy and Money in a Post-Peak Oil World” (Chelsea Green Publishing, White River Junction, Vt., 2009) He says that alternative fuels are only patchwork. The best are solar and wind. The worst "clean coal" and "biofuels," which would only hasten the "die-off" of millions that the elite cares not a whit about. From his book:
CLEAN COAL
“Clean coal is one of the biggest lies in human history. It would be a suicidal policy,” Ruppert writes.
• There is not a single clean-coal generating plant in the WORLD. Coal combustion emits many poisonous substances like sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, and lots of particulate mater in addition to CO2.
• Commercially viable carbon sequestration is still a theoretical and hugely expensive proposition. It IS being done in real life, but not on a cost-effective basis and it is NOT being done at any generating plant ANYWHERE. Even if you figured out the initial processes, you would still have the very expensive proposition of compressing and transporting the CO2 over long distances to either underwater caverns or to geological formations.
• Then there is the solid waste. Each year U.S. power plants kick out enough of the stuff to fill a train of coal cars stretching from Manhattan to L.A. and back three and a half times.
• Julian Darley, now an energy analyst in London is the founder of the Post Carbon Institute. He says the only possibl efuture for mankind will be one whre carbon-based fuels are a SIDEBAR to other, sustainable regimes He noted that mining coal by itself produces huge amounts of toxic waste. “Clean coal” doesn’t address that end of the equation at all. “Carbon sequestration has NOT been implemented yet. We’ve run out of money to use it. We’ll come back and do it later, maybe,…when there’s more money.”
Ruppert says that, as president, you look at the economy, the deficits and you understand that there isn’t going to be any retrofitting later on. Coal production could peak in as litte as 15 years. America’s railway system has been neglected and this is the only realistic way to ship coal over long distances.
The railways would have to be rebuilt. None of this has been set in motion as of yet.
BIOFUELS
Historically, the balance in nature was tipped about 10,000 to 20,000 years ago when humans first tilled the soil. “What remained of that balance vaporized in the last 100 years,” Ruppert writes.
Over the last 60 years, humans have taken to artificially replenishing soil nutrients with chemicals derived from oil and natural gas. Natural gas is the feedstock for all nitrogen-based fertilizers. “It greatly increase productivity, but is not sustainable and actually harms the soil,” Rupper says.
This “green revolution” as it was called in the 1950s and 1960s is what accelerated the massive population explosion over the last century from just over one billion people to near seven billion people on the planet.
“Ancient civilizations perished because they did not rotate their crops,” Ruppert says, and farmers worldwide have returned to monocropping because of the oil-based fertilizers and pesticides and herbicides. Soils have been turned into addicts that can’t function without the chemicals.
Globalization will die with ever-increasing fuel costs, Ruppert writes, and that is a good thing. All regions of the world will have to resort to localized food production.
“In a very real sense we are literally eating fossil fuels. However, due to the laws of thermodynamics, there is not a direct correspondence between energy inflow and outflow or agriculture. Along the way there is a marked energy loss. Between 1945 and 1994, energy input to agriculture increased four-fold while crop yields only increased three-fold. Now, we have reached the point of MARGINAL RETURNS. The ‘Green Revolution’ is becoming bankrupt.’”
The U.S. food system consumes 10 times more energy than it produces in food energy. Modern intensive agriculture is unsustainable. It takes 500 years to replace one inch of topsoil, Ruppert writes, and the soil is eroding 30 times faster than the natural formation rate.
Agricultural consumes 85% of all U.S. fresh water resources. Overdraft has made the Colorado River a trickle by the time it reaches the Pacific. The great Ogallala aquifer that supplies much of the water for the southern and central plains states and on into New York will become unproductive in a matter of decades.
"The U.S. food system consumes 10 times more energy than it produces in food energy."
Brazil makes fuel ethanol work. How? They're harvesting the whole plant (sugar cane), and are SITTING on the equator (harvest lasts all year long). American corn farmers want you to think that you can harvest at latitude 35 (harvest is once, maybe twice A YEAR), and just the corn kernel (like, throw away the rest of the plant). Ferment it, power your car with it, and its all good.
This is the corn lobby speaking: logic has long since left the building. But, says Obama, lets throw money at them anyway...
Brazil is still inputting massive amounts of oil and natural gas into the process in the form of fertilizer, pesticides and fuel for the harvesting and processing machinery, leading to a *net loss* of overall energy.
Add to that the fact that Brazil is producing E85 equivalent fuel, a petroleum/alcohol blend, which is still using oil BTW. And you still have to use oil based lubricants. Not to mention the oil used in making the various plastic components for the vehicles.
And ethanol blended fuels are actually less efficient, meaning you have to have specially tuned engines that can only use ethanol blend fuels, and more of them for the same performance as a straight petrol or Diesel engine. So again a loss of overall energy.
Please read this article about Brazil's cane-ethanol, http://www.theoildrum.com/story/2006/10/10/171011/86
An excerpt:
"One the issue of sugarcane ethanol EROEI [Energy Returned on Energy Invested, or Net Energy], which has been debated here a great deal, the study mentioned two different literature reports. The first was by Oliveira et al. in 2005, and it concluded that the EROEI was between 3.1 and 3.9. The second report was by Macedo et al. in 2004 and it concluded that the EROEI was between 8.3 and 10.2. (Note that the "bad" EROEI was still over double the EROEI of corn ethanol.) Due to the huge disparity between the two papers, the authors took a look at the underlying numbers, and concluded that the discrepancy involved the amount of diesel used in the agricultural operations process. They ultimately tracked down another paper that agreed with the Macedo study, so they reasoned that the diesel consumption numbers used by Oliviera were erroneous. They therefore concluded that an EROEI between 8.3 and 10.2 was legitimate.
"Not surprisingly, the greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reduction for sugarcane ethanol was estimated to be >80%. EROEI and GHG emissions are very closely related, such that a renewable energy source possessing a high EROEI should demonstrate a high level of GHG emission reduction."
Astonishing. Truly he's getting advice from where the money is, not where the science is. Go local and build community that can better withstand the results of our shortsightedness. It's possible.
Great post garlanddegreeff,
Thank you for it. One thing nobody wants to talk about is population control. Without it we are certain to face a monumental extinction event for our species. China's one child policy needed to be adopted world-wide last century. Failure to control our numbers and to control unbridled capitalism will be our epitaph I'm afraid.
Best Luck in your endeavors,
TJ
"All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent." - Thomas Jefferson
I admit it's the pure speculation of despair, but I'm wondering if Steven Chu is even now secretly perfecting the one technology that can rescue the planet, not to mention Obama's sagging administration and place in history: an engine that runs on bullshit.
· Yr Obd't Servant
On a mundane technical note I believe the choice to feed our food to our cars as opposed to selling it on the world market
should not trouble anyone. Lets keep in mind corn is an oil intensive crop so this is not an energy solution but rather politics by the same old means.
Also agriculture involves taking nutrients form the soil and from fertilizers inputs (it's one or the other) to produce biomass. If we don't input fossil fuel based fertilizers then we must use manures in which case we are back to a solar based economy. A solar based economy will not power out current life style.
Clean coal is a euphemism for "Hey guys, lets build more coal plants so we an continue blowing the tops off West Virginia mountains too". It also requires the building of the more expensive combined cycle type coal gasification plants to separate the co2 as a gas. Of course the utility industry hates these because they are less profitable than the old fashion kind but the coal companies don't care because they do burn coal. If the choice is between less or no profits lets choose less. In fact these plants are so expensive to run there is really no point in building them. They are merely another type of political favor.. Also who is going to be down with pumping all that CO2 into the ground beneath are feet?.
No, these are not serious proposals unless you happen to be on the dole for a research contract or a farm subsidy. We as a country are incapable of understanding the fix we are in so are unable to come up with the fix and so the fix is in.
Also in these times it seems we speak ironically because being serious is way to square and boring.
Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS): Take an unlimited amount of CO2 bury it underground or underwater and keep it there forever so we can continue the consumerist lifestyle indefinitely. Doesn't sound right to me but then I don't like consumerism in the first place.
CO2 sometimes gets buried by natural processes. In Camaroon a landslide in 1986 resulted in a release of CO2 from Lake Nyos that killed 1700 people. Something similar happened in Lake Monoun in 1984 killing 37 people. To prevent another tragedy they installed a tube that allowed the CO2 to escape without building up. Obviously, they wouldn't want to do that in a CCS situation.
Of course, they will say the are taking precautions to prevent this from happening in CCS but who's to say their precautions would be good enough? Earthquakes happen unexpectedly. Shit happens all the time that no one predicted. Remember they are talking about keeping the CO2 from all the coal in the world buried forever.
Obama is getting some really bad advice.
Clean coal is BS. On the other hand, coal is better than using up the last of our oil.
Biodiesel is also only a small solution. When feedstock is used frying oil and waste like cotton seed oil where the water and energy used to produce the feedstock was offset for another use (food, fiber) then it is good. But there isn't enough of that to replace even half our fuels.
Biodiesel from feedstock grown especially to create fuel is a terrible idea. Water is more precious than oil and food is more necessary than fuel and this uses too much of both.
The problem with all of the solutions, such as they are, is that they involve the continued use and depletion of oil and natural gas. Using them more selectively still uses them. It's that whole 'lesser of two evils' problem.
We are living out the worst case scenario of Jevon's Paradox. Look it up, apply it to Peak Oil (and Peak Resources in general), take into account the general economic Collapse and Climate Change, and you get a pretty good idea of where we are headed... and it ain't Disneyland.
"Bad advice"? No, more like pandering to the oil and coal industries ,just like always.
I ,for one, am sick and tired of Obama's grandiose schemes that are couched in elegant rhetoric and go nowhere. Time he got down to nuts and bolts fundamental reforms and an agenda that actually aides the working families.
Legalize marijuana for energy, food, most nutritious essential oils, medicine, paper, cloth, composite board, ending deforestation, CO2 reduction, curbing global warming, creativity enhancement, augmenting state budgets, civil rights, ending imprisonment of non-violent users, ending invasive urine testing, curbing authoritarianism, removing stigma, rescuing liberalism, recreational use, enhancing art and science, liberating consciousness from ego, curbing consumerism and materialism, bringing democracy to its grassroots, for love and peace and much more...
A little while ago I watched Ed Shultz on MSNBC. He had the governor of Montana on, Schweitzer, to talk a little about Obama's "clean coal" proposal. Ed started by saying there's no such thing as clean coal, and Gov. Schweitzer said that's not true, that Montana and N.D. have been burning coal in a big plant and capturing the carbon which is being pumped into oil fields in Saskatchewan, to eventually turn into more oil. What is going on here? This governor brazenly and confidently asserts that clean coal is already a reality, we have the technology and only need to apply it the right way. Is he lying? If he is, how the hell do these people think they can get away with such blatant bullshit?
This was a very brief interview (as nearly all MSNBC interviews are) so Schweitzer didn't have to defend his assertions, but this technology either: 1)exists and is being used already very successfully; or 2)exists mostly in theory or prototype and hasn't really been tested sufficiently; or 3)doesn't exist except in the fevered imaginations of politicians who buy lies by the trainload from coal executives. Ed Shultz himself claimed that Montana and North Dakota alone have enough coal to power this country for a thousand years. That's right, 1,000 years. Then we hear that "peak coal" is expected in 15 to 20 years.
Does anybody really know anything, or is everyone just making their favorite assertions because they either like coal or hate it? How can questions like this be simply "political"? Doesn't science matter anymore?
Obama stumping for biofuels is another political boondoggle. It's been known for about 15 years already that ethanol requires more fossil fuel (gasoline) per acre than it produces on the other end as corn ethanol. So it's a loser from the git go, environmentally and agriculturally. It means monoculture farming where most of the midwest now is planted in corn that is only being used for driving cars and trucks. In most midwestern states all you see are two crops: corn and soybeans. Pollute pollute pollute, from one end of the spectrum to the other. And then claim we're doing "clean energy".
Thanks to garlanddegreeff for that informative post.
coal is carbon bonded to itself, C-C, so when you burn it, you're actually releasing the energy in that bond and replacing it with the much lower energy in a C-O bond. oil is carbon bonded to hydrogen, C-H, so when you burn it, you're releasing the energy in the C-H bond, and replacing it with the lower energy of the C-O bond.
People talk about 'sequestering' CO2, and I suppose its possible, but its definitely not 'sequestered' in any chemical way. Its probably just physically capturing (perhaps through absorption) CO2 in a matrix underground where it doesn't get released to the atmosphere right away. If the 'matrix' is oil, it seems to me all you are doing is carbonating the oil (yes, carbonated soda's are CO2-infused liquids). This might slow the release of the CO2 to the atmosphere, but CO2 is going to get into the atmosphere eventually until it is fixed by chlorophyll in an organic plant reaction requiring sunlight. (cuz that really IS a chemical fixing, and if you're going to fix CO2 with sunlight via plants, why not just build solar panels and use the sunlight directly for electricity?).
I wish them luck with the carbon sequestration technology, but it seems to me that they can't hope to fix carbon chemically, only physically. And that is not a permanent 'bond' in the chemical sense. It may work in some areas (dependent on large amounts of underground substrate for CO2 infusion), but not in others. Either way, it sounds extremely problamatic.
I don't watch Ed anymore. He's supporting bad decisions made by Obama as is most of MSNBC.
I recall Obama supported "clean coal" during the campaign. That was yet another red flag--I should have paid closer attention...................
Putting our Hope and Trust into things we can believe in - like the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy?
Is the Easter bunny clean coal and the Tooth Fairy biofuels? Or is it the other way around?
Michael Ruppert's info is right on! THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS CLEAN COAL!!
What corporations probably like about it is that it releases LOTS of mercury into the air we breath that helps keep us stupid.
The scrubbers in the stacks collect some of the particle matter like fly ash which is sold back to us as Portland cement and gypsum which is made into sheet rock which we buy and live in(i.e. the interior walls of our homes).
Bio-fuel, which is mainly made from corn in the US, is genetically modified(GM) corn made by the Nazi corporation Monsanto. Most of the world won't buy their GM corn because of negative health effects,so what isn't forced down our throats as food, they get us to buy as fuel. And you don't have to be a college grad to know that growing a food product of any sort to use as a fuel to burn is STUPID and unsustainable. You want clean air to breath and less C02 in the atmosphere, get rid of the combustion engine and the organized crimminals that keep us lock in to it.
Nuclear Power, da,da,stupider than stupid! There can never be safe nuclear power.
KEY THING TO KNOW ABOUT ELECTRICITY, best use for it is lighting(incandescent) and turning motors. Worst use is generating heat(i.e.baseboard heat, hot water heaters, stoves, clothes dryers, and of course industrial electric smelters like for aluminum). Oh yeah, compact florescent light bulbs are full of poisonous mercury, which I'm guessing is recycled from the "clean coal industry". They love to feed us their toxic garbage
First of all, there's no such thing as "clean" coal. That's total BS. Coal would produce an even higher amount of air and water pollution, and more acid rain.
Secondly, the biofuels and ethanol sound equally disastrous, in their own rights.
Amazing,
Billions starving around the world and we burn food for energy!!
Mindboggling!!!
You know this whole dirty coal/peak oil debate could become moot real quick if the current earthquake swarm in Yellowstone (which started out 15 km deep and is now 5 km deep) leads to an eruption of the largest supervolcano in North America.
[Here's my poem about "LoraxAg," which is the Dr. Seuss-like name of one of those "clean coal" corporations. Sorry if this is a repeat for folks. It seemed fairly timely here.]
Into the hills and dales they wrought
and blew the mountains from the spot.
The rivers ran with streaks of black
from shoveled coal of LoraxAg.
They said, "You see this is quite green,"
but many saw a different scene,
lifeless stumps and desolation,
all laid bare by a corporation!
The puffs of smoke, they filled the skies,
the people choked and rubbed their eyes.
"How dare they tell that black is green,
How dare they say, 'This coal is clean'."
The people raised their hands on high,
They got together. They organized!
They massed before the White House lawn,
but Obama had already done them all wrong.
The President, you see, had already gleaned
oodles of money from LoraxAg, it seemed.
And just when the cause was quite out of reach,
the Supreme Court said that "money is speech!"
Against all the odds, the people rebelled.
They wrote angry letters, their numbers swelled.
The President began to fear for his future.
He said, "Clean coal's out, so how 'bout nuclear?"
-TIA
http://www.commondreams.org/further/2010/01/29-0
"Clean coal"??? What an oxymoron. How much longer is this asinine concept going to be peddled to the world? Until it is believed??? How stupid does Obama think we are? But perhaps he is right: we are stupid...at least those who voted for him. Change! What change???
I think CD need to be more careful with it'd headlines.
I agree that "clean coal" is largely just marketing slogan, and I am very skeptical of the practicality of carbon capture and storage on large scale. But we won't know until some demonstration projects are built.
Certain coal mining methods still need to be banned - MTR, and longwall mining where the long-term surface water resource impacts are unacceptable.
But to categorically reject coal as an energy source when there is a chance (probably small) that CCS will prove practcal, and destructive mining practices can be banned, just reinforces the idea among opponents that we have ideological agenda that has nothing to do with addressing AGW.
From cradle to grave clean coal is a dirty lie! Thedirtylie.com is dedicated to exposing all the AMAZING ATROCITIES of the coal industry and those funding it! Find out more at thedirtylie.com!