"Coal is 80% of the planet's problem"

I'm not sure where he gets '80% of the problem' from. The example given states that coal produces twice as much CO2 as petroleum products for the same amount of electricity - that's a 2:1 ratio, not a 4:1 ratio.

But golly, what about "clean coal"?

Okay, seriously, what about "clean coal," anyhow?  What's up with all the advertising for it on CNN lately, as if it's the new saviour technology?  What the heck is supposed to be the difference between "clean coal" and any other kind? 

"All fossil fuels are a problem, for they all release carbon dioxide that was buried underground long ago back into the atmosphere, but coal is by far the worst. A coal-fired generating plant emits twice as much carbon dioxide as a gas-fired plant that produces the same amount of electricity.

That is where the big cuts must be made soon if we are to escape grave consequences, and going after aviation emissions now is only a fashionable distraction."

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But that would mean building nuclear plants to replace them - and maybe threatening China with banning their products until they do the same. Of course, we could always become discriminating coal buyers. Anthracite is good. Peat is bad.

A bit over the top?

No sillier than calling aviation emissions a "fashionable distraction."  No, abstinence in all things is called for, I'm afraid. Information technology and imagination or we're toast. 

Far as I can make out, Michelle, clean coal starts with low sulphur stuff (anthracites), scrubbers on the stacks, and, finally, means of burying those carbon emissions far underground.

At least, I believe that's how it's going  to be sold. Progressively better.

From here, it seems doable up to the burial part. And until that is done, clean does not mean the absence of the important bit being added to the atmosphere, CO 2. Sort of what "Steve" was trying to sell us three years back.

Wrong comparision. You need to compare the total amount of electricity and GHG emissions produced by coal to that  produced by petroleum products. To say nothing of airborne mercury pollution.

Understood. But where is that data? Assuming that the 2:1 ratio holds true across the board, for all purposes, is coal actually utilized twice as much as petroleum products worldwide?

Drift a bit ...

I'm reminded of the Indigenous view of Mother Earth as a living thing, where coal in the ground is the liver of the earth, absorbing toxins and impurities.(Gems and other underground things have other functions.)

Thus, we are not only polluting the earth in the process of digging out coal, 'cleaning' it and burning it, we are reducing the ability of the earth to clean itself of toxins.

I'm of the view that we should be working toward not using anything for fuel that comes from underground, nor should we be burying toxic wastes.

I think the idea also is to choose your battles and to focus your energy at least on where you have a chance of succeeding.  Trying to stop an additional runway at, is it the planet's busiest airport, seemed quite insurmountable.

Ask the public which environmental initiative they could get behind and sink their teeth into; confronting an ugly dirty smoke-billowing coal plant or an airport runway, well you don't even have to ask.

There's no such thing as clean coal is there, apart from the nonsense espoused by pr firms?

We produce very little electrical energy with natural gas and oil.So if you look at how we produce electricity, you see where he gets his number.

There is no working example of clean coal (carbon sequestering). Read This.

"Coal is 80 percent of the planet's problems," he said in an interview with The Observer. "You have to keep your eye on the ball and not waste your efforts. The number one enemy is coal and we should not forget that."

And I thought we were 99.99 percent of the problem.

Does this mean that if we were to close all coal mines we would be 80 percent closer to the solution? Some how I have my doubts. What about deforestation and an acidic Ocean. And not to forget a 'civilization' based on an ever increasing consumption.

Clean-Coal Debate Pits Al Gore’s Group Against Obama, Peabody

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=aqk2JyvYFwe8&refer=home [13]

Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore [14] and his Alliance for Climate Protection [15] say clean-coal technology is a fantasy.

Peabody Energy Corp. [16], the biggest U.S. coal producer, says another prominent Democrat has pledged to make the technology a reality: President Barack Obama [17].

The Gore-Obama split illustrates a growing debate in the U.S. as the new president attempts to deliver on his promise [18] to reduce carbon dioxide emissions in the country 80 percent by 2050. Depending on who’s speaking, coal is either the villain or part of the solution.

“The coal groups are saying we need clean coal,” said Mark Maddox, the former head of the Energy Department’s fossil energy office under former President George W. Bush [19], in an interview. “Environmentalists are saying there is no clean coal, and we aren’t going to help you get it.”

Coal is at the center of the discussion about so-called green energy because the fuel provides half of U.S. electricity -- and 30 percent of the greenhouse-gas emissions that contribute to global warming.

The issue, framed in dueling television campaigns, is whether U.S. energy policy should be based on what is still largely an assumption: that technology can capture carbon emissions before they go into the air and store them permanently underground.

$300 Million Campaign

Portraying clean coal as a mirage, the Alliance for Climate Protection’s first commercial [20], shown on broadcast and cable networks starting last December, features an announcer showing off “today’s clean-coal technology” as he gestures toward empty terrain. In a new ad now running, an actor playing a coal company executive says, “Don’t worry about climate change, leave that to us.”

The commercials are the start of an ad campaign for clean energy that the group, based in Menlo Park, California, has said will cost $300 million over 3 years. Spokesman Brian Hardwick declined to say how much advertising has been purchased so far. Gore is the organization’s founder and chairman.

“We thought it was a key moment to let people know that we are faced with a climate crisis, and we shouldn’t have any illusion that clean coal exists today,” Hardwick said in an interview.

Obama’s Words

Gore has called for the U.S. to produce all of its electricity from renewable energy by 2018, instead of “dirty fossil fuels” such as coal and oil.

After the environmentalists began their anti-coal commercials, response ads were mustered by companies led by Peabody of St. Louis and operators of coal-fired power plants, such as the Southern Co. [21] of Atlanta and American Electric Power Co. [22] of Columbus, Ohio.

The coal industry’s commercials tap into Obama’s credentials as a clean-energy advocate, showing excerpts from a speech he gave in Lebanon, Virginia, in September.

“Clean-coal technology is something that can make America energy-independent,” Obama says in the ad, which has run on cable channels such as CNN, Fox News and MSNBC.

The industry-sponsored American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity [23] spent $18 million last year on television commercials, compared with the $48 million for those run by Gore’s group, according to Joe Lucas, a spokesman for the Alexandria, Virginia-based group of coal producers and users.

False Start

“We thought it was important to do what we could to get another side of the story out there,” said Michael Morris [24], AEP’s chief executive, in an interview. The industry is trying “to reach out to some of the policy makers” with its message that adding restrictions on coal would damage the already struggling economy.

Power producers spent $36 billion on coal in 2007 and consumers paid $343 billion for electricity from all sources, or almost 3 percent of U.S. gross domestic product, according to data from the Energy Information Administration [25].

Prospects for the new technology were clouded last year, when Samuel Bodman [26], Bush’s Energy secretary, canceled plans to build a clean-coal plant in Illinois. The cost of the facility, initially estimated at $1 billion, had soared to at least $1.8 billion. Bodman said funding the technology at multiple plants would be an “all-around better deal.”

The House-passed version of Obama’s economic stimulus plan would provide $2.4 billion for development of carbon capture and storage, according to a summary issued by Speaker Nancy Pelosi [27], a California Democrat. The version now before the Senate has at least $4.6 billion for that purpose, according to Bill Wicker [28], a spokesman for Senate Energy Committee Chairman Jeff Bingaman [29], a New Mexico Democrat.

‘Robust Research’

Obama, who has pledged to spend $150 billion over 10 years to combat climate change and create “green” jobs, hasn’t said how much of that should go to clean-coal technology.

Even Gore supports research.

‘It’s quite responsible to support robust research into whether or not it might in the future become possible to safely capture and sequester CO2 from coal plants,” Gore said in testimony last week before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “But we should not delude ourselves about the likelihood that that’s going to occur in the near-term or even the mid-term.”

While Gore remains skeptical, industry groups are encouraged that members of the Obama administration have tempered their past comments about coal, according to Luke Popovich [30], a vice president for the Washington-based National Mining Association [31], which represents coal producers.

‘A Huge Sum’

Months before Obama’s campaign remarks about the promise of new technology, he said in a recorded interview [32] with the San Francisco Chronicle last January, “If somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can, it’s just that it will bankrupt them because they’re going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.”

Obama’s Energy Secretary Steven Chu [33] had called coal his “worst nightmare” in a 2007 speech. At his Senate confirmation hearing on Jan. 13, Chu said the fuel is a “great natural resource” that the “the U.S., with its great technological leadership, should rise to the occasion to develop.”

Too bad.

Dark Days for Green Energy

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/04/business/04windsolar.html?ref=business [35]

Wind and solar power [36] have been growing at a blistering pace in recent years, and that growth seemed likely to accelerate under the green-minded Obama administration. But because of the credit crisis [37] and the broader economic downturn, the opposite is happening: installation of wind and solar power is plummeting.

Despite layoffs, Rich Mattern, the mayor of West Fargo, N.D., has high hopes for wind energy.

Towers for wind turbines on the ground at the DMI Industries plant in West Fargo, N.D. Falling sales and tight credit have forced the company to lay off nearly 20 percent of its employees.

Factories building parts for these industries have announced a wave of layoffs in recent weeks, and trade groups are projecting 30 to 50 percent declines this year in installation of new equipment, barring more help from the government.

Prices for turbines and solar panels, which soared when the boom began a few years ago, are falling. Communities that were patting themselves on the back just last year for attracting a wind or solar plant are now coping with cutbacks.

“I thought if there was any industry that was bulletproof, it was that industry,” said Rich Mattern, the mayor of West Fargo, N.D., where DMI Industries of Fargo operates a plant that makes towers for wind turbines. Though the flat Dakotas are among the best places in the world for wind farms, DMI recently announced a cut of about 20 percent of its work force because of falling sales.

Much of the problem stems from the credit crisis that has left Wall Street banks reeling. Once, as many as 18 big banks and financial institutions were willing to help finance installation of wind turbines and solar arrays, taking advantage of generous federal tax incentives. But with the banks in so much trouble, that number has dropped to four, according to Keith Martin, a tax and project finance specialist with the law firm Chadbourne & Parke.

Wind and solar developers have been left starved for capital. “It’s absolutely frozen,” said Craig Mataczynski, president of Renewable Energy Systems Americas, a wind developer. He projected his company would build just under half as much this year as it did last year.

The two industries are hopeful that President Obama [40]’s economic stimulus package [41] will help. But it will take time, and in the interim they are making plans for a dry spell.

Solar energy companies like OptiSolar, Ausra, Heliovolt and SunPower [42], once darlings of investors, have all had to lay off workers. So have a handful of companies that make wind turbine blades or towers in the Midwest, including Clipper Windpower, LM Glasfiber and DMI.

Some big wind developers, like NextEra Energy Resources and even the Texas billionaire T. Boone Pickens [43], a promoter of wind power, have cut back or delayed their wind farm plans.

Renewable energy sources like biomass, which involves making electricity from wood chips, and geothermal [44], which harnesses underground heat for power, have also been slowed by the financial crisis, but the effects have been more pronounced on once fast-growing wind and solar.

Because of their need for space to accommodate giant wind turbines, wind farms are especially reliant on bank financing for as much as 50 percent of a project’s costs. For example, JPMorgan Chase [45], which analysts say is the most active bank remaining in the renewable energy sector, has invested in 54 wind farms and one solar plant since 2003, according to John Eber, the firm’s managing director for energy investments.

In the solar industry, the ripple effects of the crisis extend all the way to the panels that homeowners put on their roofs. The price of solar panels has fallen by 25 percent in six months, according to Rhone Resch, president of the Solar Energy Industries Association, who said he expected a further drop of 10 percent by midsummer.

(For homeowners, however, the savings will not be as substantial, partly because panels account for only about 60 percent of total installation costs.)

After years when installers had to badger manufacturers to ensure they would receive enough panels, the situation has reversed. Bill Stewart, president of SolarCraft, a California installer, said that manufacturers were now calling to say, “Hey, do you need any product this month? Can I sell you a bit more?”

The turnaround reflects reduced demand for solar panels, and also an increase in supply of panels and of polysilicon, a crucial material in many panels.

On the wind side, turbines that once had to be ordered far in advance are suddenly becoming available.

“At least one vendor has said that they have equipment for delivery in 2009, where nine months ago they wouldn’t have been able to take new orders until 2011,” Mr. Mataczynski of Renewable Energy wrote in an e-mail message. As he has scaled back his company’s plans, he has been forced to cancel some orders for wind turbines, forfeiting the deposit.

Banks have invested in renewable energy, lured by the tax credits. But with banks tightly controlling their money and profits, the main task for the companies is to find new sources of investment capital.

Wind and solar companies have urged Congress to adopt measures that could help revive the market. But even if a favorable stimulus bill passes, nobody is predicting a swift recovery.

“Nothing Congress does in the stimulus bill can put the market back where it was in 2007 and 2008, before it was broken,” said Mr. Martin, the tax lawyer with Chadbourne & Parke. “But it can help at the margins.”

The solar and wind tax credits are structured slightly differently, but the House version of the stimulus bill would help both industries by providing more immediate tax incentives, alleviating some of their dependency on banks.

Both House and Senate would also extend an important tax credit for wind energy, called the production tax credit, for three years; previously the industry had complained of boom-and-bust cycles with the credit having to be renewed nearly every year.

Over the long term, with Mr. Obama focused on a concerted push toward greener energy, the industry remains optimistic.

“You drive across the countryside and there’s more and more wind farms going up,” said Mr. Mattern of West Fargo. “I still have big hopes.”

Thanks for the info on clean coal, folks.  I've been meaning to ask here about it for a while.

So could burning coal be contributing to this heat crisis in Australia, in which 26 people have just perished in bushfires?

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25024264-5006785,00.html

Those poor Australians. Is this what we can expect in Canada this summer?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7877178.stm

The leader of the Green party, Bob Brown said summer fires would get worse unless Australia and other nations showed more leadership on reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

"It's a sobering reminder of the need for this nation and the whole world to act and put at a priority our need to tackle climate change," he said.

I don't entirely agree that there is not a global warming aspect to this tragegy, seeing as there has been record temperatures in the Melbourne area this week.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article5689447.ece

The most disheartening aspect of the Kinglake disaster is that since its foundation in the 1880s the township has suffered regular bushfires, in 1926, in 1939, in the 1960s, in the Ash Wednesday fires of 1983; two years ago almost to the day 1,500 hectares were destroyed by fire, but nothing was learnt. The cause of these disasters is not global warming; still less is it arson. It is the failure to recognise that fire is an intrinsic feature of eucalypt bushland. It cannot be prevented but it can and should be managed. Unless there is a fundamental change of policy across all levels of government in Australia, there will be more and worse fires and more deaths.

Tim Flannery, the down under author of The Weathermakers, would certainly disagree with your thumbnail summation of Australia's problems with drought, He writes of changes occurring in flora at different elevations based on careful observations over decades.

 Some might even call your IT observations facile, NorthReport.

Bushfires and global warming: is there a link?

Scientists have a hunch rising temperatures due to human activity are making fire and flood more likely

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/feb/08/global-warming-weather-science [52]

Roger Stone, a climate expert at the University of Southern Queensland, said: "It certainly fits the climate change models, but I have to add the proviso that it's very difficult, even with extreme conditions like this, to always attribute it to climate change."

The fires and floods come as politicians gear up to negotiate a new global deal to combat climate change, to replace the Kyoto protocol. Australia plans a comprehensive carbon trading scheme, but green campaigners last year accused Kevin Rudd's government of a "betrayal" when it pledged to reduce emissions by a modest 5-15% by 2020.

Professor Mark Adams, from the Bushfire Cooperative Research Centre, said the extreme weather conditions that led to the bushfires are likely to occur more often.

"The weather and climatic conditions recently don't augur well for the future. Bushfires are an important and going to be ever-present part of the landscape," he said.

Australia is in the grip of the worst drought in a century, which has stretched for more than seven years in some areas and has forced restrictions on water use in the country's big cities.

A government-commissioned report on climate change last year warned that exceptionally hot years, which used to occur once every 22 years, would occur every one or two years, virtually making drought a permanent part of the Australian environment.

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[53]

A fair and balanced account, NR. We always hope that it is not a foretaste of climate change, of course. But I kind of depend on the scientific perspective.

So do I GV, so do I. As long that is, it is free and clear of manipulation by vested interests.

http://www.straight.com/article/the-weather-makers

Around the same time, the administration of President George W. Bush, himself an oil man, adopted a strict policy of censorship to see to it that no federal official, not even James Hanson, head of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, would candidly and honestly explain all those grim global-warming scenarios.

It had been Hanson's habit to be very clear that the shrinking of Greenland's glaciers and the increased atmospheric loading of carbon dioxide, as well as the growing acidity of the world's oceans, are all part of a story that begins with the burning of fossil fuels. Hanson had begun to warn that without a major reduction in these "greenhouse gas" emissions, the planet would soon pass a "tipping point" of sorts, where there will be no turning back.

Like the silenced Hanson, the Australian paleontologist Tim Flannery is convinced that humanity is crossing a tipping point in climate change, and the consequences are likely to be horrific. Unlike Hanson, Flannery is not easily made to shut up.

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What the Bush administration has been especially adamant in censoring is the research U.S. federal scientists have been doing in the area of "impacts and response strategies". And it's that kind of research that brings us straight back again to the strange events unfolding in British Columbia.

If you want to know whether or not, say, Richmond's dikes can be expected to withstand an anticipated sea-level rise of perhaps a metre, you turn to a federal agency known as the Canadian Climate Impacts and Adaptation and Research Network (C-CIARN), which concentrates on precisely the types of climate-change impacts and response strategies the White House doesn't want to hear about.

And if you were to ask such questions of Robin Sydneysmith, C-CIARN's B.C. coordinator, as I did the other day, this is the answer you would get: "I'm not supposed to talk to you."

The day before I telephoned him, Sydneysmith had just been advised that the entire C-CIARN program-and even the drop-in-the-bucket "one tonne challenge" initiative, designed to convince individual Canadians to voluntarily pitch in to reduce their greenhouse-gas emissions-had been suspended, on the order of Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

Everything is up in the air, Sydneysmith said. The word from Ottawa was that things were in a "holding pattern".

Harper, it needs to be remembered, is the Alberta oil-patch Republican and Bush acolyte who vociferously opposed the Kyoto Accord-the international treaty requiring signatory countries to scale back their emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse-gas emissions in an effort to staunch the global-warming hemorrhage.

Harper has long insisted that Ottawa should not interfere with Alberta's oil industry, which drives the economy of his political base, which is, in turn, roaring along a growth trajectory that's expected to push Canada to a point 44 percent above its permitted Kyoto levels within the next five years.

Harper has also insisted that Canada will not meet its Kyoto commitments, but shortly after winning the election he vowed that even so, Canada would still, somehow, work within the Kyoto treaty, all the while developing a "made in Canada" solution to the climate-change problem.

It was by this hypocrisy that C-CIARN was cast into its limbo, even though it was a central feature in what was already a "made in Canada" solution, and even though C-CIARN wasn't even concerned with any "controversial" assessments of the role that fossil fuels play in the disassembly of the planet's fragile climate systems. In these ways, Canada is being dragged back from an emerging position of leadership in the global struggle to control greenhouse gases, and everything is simply ambiguous again, and shrouded in dispute, and irredeemably politicized. And it is precisely this murky state of affairs that has kept global warming at the margins of serious public attention for so long.

"Every time we have something stupid, like the political developments in Canada, it's a real step backwards," Flannery told me. "It's crazy. It can't go on. But we have to have a real determination to win. We've just got to keep pushing."