Just So Much Gas

Clean coal… kinda sounds like, new, improved, vitamin enriched coal. Yum. All that greenhouse carbon dioxide (CO2) that is the nasty byproduct of burning coal… hey, we can handle it! NOT! Just as the military has determined that global warming could trigger natural disasters, agricultural calamity and political destabilization that could topple nations and draw American forces into combat, it would seem mandatory that we start cleaning up! No room for mythology.

The August 8^th New York Times: “Recent war games and intelligence studies conclude that over the next 20 to 30 years, vulnerable regions, particularly sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and South and Southeast Asia, will face the prospect of food shortages, water crises and catastrophic flooding driven by climate change that could demand an American humanitarian relief or military response.

“An exercise last December at the National Defense University, an educational institute that is overseen by the military, explored the potential impact of a destructive flood in Bangladesh that sent hundreds of thousands of refugees streaming into neighboring India, touching off religious conflict, the spread of contagious diseases and vast damage to infrastructure. ‘It gets real complicated real quickly,’ said Amanda J. Dory, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy, who is working with a Pentagon group assigned to incorporate climate change into national security strategy planning.”

Since the U.S. is loaded with coal, the Saudi Arabia of coal if you will, we need to burn coal – clean coal that is – to achieve energy independence. Lots of it. Tons and tons of it. But exactly what is the “clean coal” we’ve heard politicians bandy about. Some cool new technology that turns this carbon dioxide into a harmless but useful substance? There are a few such technologies that have been devised to do that, but they are so far from any economic deployment so as to be meaningless. The real “clean coal” is more like a game of hide the salami… find empty oil fields and aquifers and pressure pump all that emitted carbon dioxide deep into the earth… for decades if necessary… until we figure out what to do with the nasty stuff. Bury it out of sight and out of mind.

The euphemism for this folly? Carbon capture. The August 9^th Washington Post: “Yet carbon capture and storage remains the elusive holy grail of the coal industry, an idea that could contain the damage inflicted by coal-burning power plants but a technology that remains expensive, energy intensive and largely untested. Even optimists say it will not be commercially available for another six to 10 years. Pessimists say it might take much longer, and may never be ready for widespread use without attaching a punishingly high price to carbon.” Oooh, that doesn’t sound too good.

But wait, there’s more! The Post continues: “‘There is no credible pathway towards prudent greenhouse gas stabilization targets without CO2 emissions reduction from existing coal power plants,’ Ernest Moniz, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a member of President Obama's Council of Advisers on Science and Technology, said in a report earlier this year. ‘We urgently need technology options for these plants and policies that incentivize implementation.’

“Coal ‘is still the elephant in the room,’ said John Ashton, special representative for climate change at Britain's Foreign and Commonwealth Office, at a meeting in Washington last month. ‘We can't deal with it, we can't tame it without . . . carbon capture and storage.’ He said that to meet the newly agreed upon target of limiting global warming to two degrees, nations must make carbon capture ‘standard technology by 2020.’”

Dirty coal; we’ve got plenty of that… legacy plants (pre-1977) operating in urban environments in and around cities like Chicago, Washington, D.C., Detroit, Cleveland and Milwaukie are killing us. The August 16^th Washington Post: “Public health advocates say these urban power plants can pose a threat to local residents, with ozone-forming compounds and particulate matter exacerbating respiratory and cardiac problems. A 2001 study by a Harvard School of Public Health professor suggested that statistically, the two [legacy] Chicago plants could cause 41 premature deaths and 550 emergency room visits per year.”

So we have plenty of dirty coal, and there really isn’t any such thing as clean coal? It’s just hiding the dirt under the rug, sort of? That dirt will just continue building up? And we aren’t technologically ready to do even that? So the government is contradicting itself? What a surprise!

I’m Peter Dekom, and I admire this attempt at government double-speak.