Dear Governors Ritter, Huntsman, and Freudenthal,
It's kind of like saying jumbo shrimp. Or pretty ugly. Or, maybe closest of all, sanitary landfill.
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The sooner we kick the habit of fooling ourselves about climate change, the sooner we'll actually begin to address it.
Case in point #1: George Will's factually challenged op-ed in the Washington Post. It's not astonishing, but it is disappointing, that a major newspaper is so complicit in the distribution of false information.
Case in point #2, out here in the West: your letter encouraging President Obama to prioritize so-called 'clean coal' technology.
Of course, Governor Ritter, you have earned a (well-deserved) reputation for promoting renewables. But when I read this ...
Finding a way to use our Nation’s rich supplies of coal in a manner that avoids emissions of carbon dioxide and other pollutants is absolutely vital to the success of any national effort to reduce emissions, promote national security and create jobs.
(emphasis mine)
... it's difficult to keep from laughing. Or crying. Absolutely vital?
Here's the deal: clean coal doesn't exist.
There is no available technology to cost-effectively sequester carbon dioxide from power plants on a large scale. Nobody has yet captured even one coal-fired generation station's emission of carbon dioxide, much less figured out how to apply such a technology on a massive scale.
Plus, since coal plants are located all over the place, but geologically-suitable storage sites for carbon dioxide aren't always right next door, there's the additional cost of moving the stuff.
There are also significant technical hurdles to making sure that it's contained for the long term.
Assuming the technical issues can be addressed -- quite a large assumption -- there's the issue of cost.
How much is it going to cost, on top of what's paid today for electricity, to build a transportation and sequestration infrastructure for 'clean coal'? We mine about 1.1 billion tons of coal annually (PDF) in the USA. Burning that much coal creates at least 1.9 billion tons of carbon dioxide.
Next, how will the ability to sequester carbon dioxide be sustained, year after year, at nearly two billion tons a year of carbon dioxide production? To give a sense of scale, the largest of the pyramids in Egypt weighs about 6 million tons, so we're talking about storing the mass of more than 300 pyramids each year.
Of course, carbon dioxide is a gas that's far less dense than stone, so we're really talking about a hell of a lot of gas here. Since it has to be compressed to inject it into the earth, there is a significant energy (and therefore dollar) cost to sequestration.
Finally, there's the issue of time. This speculative, hoped-for technology has yet to be developed. It wouldn't happen in a year or two, or three. Wide deployment would take much longer still ... consider how long it would take to build the facilities, pipelines, etc.
We don't have a year, or three, or more, to begin seriously addressing climate change. Every day of delay is a harsher climate outcome for the world our kids will have to live in.
Meanwhile, there's an enormous pool of technologies for energy efficiency that 1.) save money rather than costing, 2.) can be deployed quickly, and 3.) are available now as off-the-shelf technology.
Maybe we can throw some research dollars at the sequestration concept. But, even under unrealistically optimistic scenarios, it's not capable of addressing problems as quickly as they need to be addressed. Yet the coal industry is already using the concept to sell coal as an "absolutely vital" solution to climate change.
So, forgive me, governors, if I think your letter to President Obama is unrealistic thumb-twiddling while the earth burns.
Sincerely,
Eric Johnson
Lafayette, CO
(also available in two shades of green)