The West Coast Climate Equity has two worthy articles on Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS). I think you should read them both.
The first post takes issue with Lawrence Solomon’s misguided editorial* on CCS that The National Post — that bastion of high school journalism — ran over the weekend. It’s written by Dorothy Cutting,** and she scores many points, explaining that sequestration comes in many guises, and we need to look closely at all of them because the climate situation is so dire.
The second post, by Guy Dauncey, carries the headline Is Clean Coal a Solution? It’s excerpted from his upcoming book The Climate Challenge: 101 Solutions to Global Warming by New Society Publishers; it will hit the shelves in the fall.
Dauncey makes all the right points. If you run a coal company, CCS is the Holy Grail, the technology that the power industry claims will let them burn the dirtiest of fossil fuels without scorching the planet. But, truth to tell, it’s just a smokescreen. It may work, it may not. The problem is that we’ve frittered away every advantage, and now we simply can’t afford to wait 20 years for the coal industry to get their shit together. Every dollar that goes to support clean coal is a dollar that could have been spent promoting clean, renewable energy like wind, wave and solar power.
We can’t mothball all our coal plants tomorrow. But we can convert the dirtiest to burn biomass as soon as possible, and we can decide to never again build another coal-fired power plant.
I’m with activist Bill McKibben at Yale360 when he says it’s time for civil disobedience at coal-fired power plants. It’s the most important battle in the climate change movement, we simply can’t afford to lose.
I’ll write more about CCS in the months ahead. Just remember that clean coal is the greatest lie of the modern age.
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Solomon’s post is an odd duck. He caught my interest for a few paragraphs by pointing out a few problems with carbon capture, and then voiced a ridiculous diatribe about rising CO2 levels being good for the planet, which is moronic.
Solomon is allowed to have an opinion. But he’s not entitled to his own monogramed set of facts. In the last half of the article, he’s just making shit up. The National Post is actually proud of its anti-scientific bias.
** Dorothy has been a wonderful source of information and encouragement for One Blue Marble. I’d walk over a bed of hot clean coals for her, except we all know that there’s no such thing as a bed of hot clean coal.