BBC Environmental Science – The government should set a deadline for coal-fired power stations to adopt “clean” technologies or close, according to a parliamentary committee. The Environment Audit Committee says the government is wrong to believe that a carbon market alone will persuade companies to invest in “clean coal”.

Its report warns that progress in this area is “extremely disappointing”. A coal-fired station produces about twice as much carbon dioxide as a gas-burning facility of equal power. …

As gas prices rise, generators are increasingly looking to coal as a cheaper and more reliable alternative.

The UK government believes - as do others - that the answer is “clean coal”, particularly technologies which capture carbon from the flue gases and store it away in natural underground voids, perhaps under the sea bed. But the technology is expensive and makes a power station less efficient, increasing the amount of fuel burned by 10-40%. …

“The solution is straightforward; consent must only be given for new
coal-fired power stations on condition that operating permits are
withdrawn if the plant fails to capture 90% of its CO2 emissions by
2020,” said the society’s president Martin Rees.

Environment groups which are campaigning against the new Kingsnorth units were more outspoken. “The government should not be relying on CCS - an unproven
technology - to justify new coal power stations,” said Tim Jones,
climate policy officer with the World Development Movement. If the government goes ahead with new coal power without CCS,
it would be setting the UK firmly on the path of high carbon emissions
without a clear end in sight.” (07/21/08)
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Richard Heinberg writes: China is the world’s foremost coal producer and consumer, surpassing the United States by a factor of two on both scores and accounting for 40 percent of total world production. Moreover, its coal consumption has been rising rapidly, at a rate of up to ten percent per year (which translates to a doubling of demand every 7 years). While China is a significant producer of oil and natural gas, coal dominates the nation’s fossil-fuel reserve base. About 70 percent of China’s total energy is derived from coal, and about 80 percent of its electricity. The country has recently become the world’s foremost greenhouse gas emitter due to its growing, coal-fed energy appetite.

This nation’s coal-mining history is probably the world’s longest, dating back up to two millennia—though modern mining methods were not introduced until the late 19th Century by European, and later by Japanese companies. Production achieved one million tons per year in 1903, growing at an average annual rate of over ten percent. Growth slowed during the civil wars of the 1920s, but resumed strongly in the mid-1930s. After the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949, coal production again slumped, then quickly increased to over 400 million tons per year by 1960, only to fall again during the turbulent years of the Cultural Revolution. Production accelerated from the 1970s on, achieving one billion tons per year in 1989. In 1996, China began addressing problems of mine safety and low productivity by closing its smallest and least efficient mines. This led to a temporary decline in production lasting until 2000; since then, production has grown with astonishing rapidity to the present annual output of roughly 2.5 billion metric tons (tonnes) or 2.7 billion US short tons.

China’s coal consumption in 2000 was 30 times its volume a half-century earlier, at the time of the establishment of the People’s Republic. And just since 2000, consumption has more than doubled.

China currently has roughly 25,000 coalmines, with 3.4 million registered employees. Many of these mines are small, private, local—and even illegal—operations that can respond quickly to the market; but they are less efficient than larger, centralized mines and tend to have more environmental and safety problems. …

China’s demand for coal imports will therefore almost certainly top
200 million tons per year by 2020, and could exceed that figure by a
wide margin. This will significantly impact regional markets, leading
to increased competition with other coal-importing countries (Japan,
South Korea, Taiwan, and India), and to much higher prices for
internationally traded coal. (Currently, the total annual volume of
internationally traded coal is just over 800 million tons.)

The supply problems discussed here appear already to be manifesting.
During the winter of 2007-2008, power plants in many parts of the
country ran short of coal due to soaring prices and transport
bottlenecks, while snow and ice storms disrupted power transmission. A People’s Daily
article, quoting Zhang Guobao, deputy head of the National Development
and Reform Commission, noted that only a “fragile balance” existed in
the thermal coal market despite huge and growing coal output. During
that same winter, prices for internationally traded coal climbed
substantially.

China’s furious pace of economic growth, which is often touted as a
sign of success, may turn out to be a fatal liability. Simply put, the
nation appears to have no Plan B. No fossil fuel other than coal will
be able to provide sufficient energy to sustain current economic growth
rates in the years ahead, and non-fossil sources will require
unprecedented and perhaps unachievable levels of investment just to
make up for declines in coal production—never mind providing enough to fuel continued annual energy growth of seven to ten percent per year.

If and when China ceases to have enough new energy to support
continued economic growth, there are likely to be unpleasant
consequences for the nation’s stability. If such consequences are to be
averted, the country’s leadership must find ways to rein in economic
growth while reducing internal social and political tensions, meanwhile
investing enormous sums in non-fossil energy sources. A serious attempt
to reduce greenhouse gas emissions would entail an identical
prescription. It is a tall order by any standard, but serious
contemplation of the alternative—which, in the worst instance, could
amount to social, economic, and environmental collapse—should be
bracing enough to motivate heroic efforts. (07/21/08)
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James Howard Kunstler et al. writes: Every night Larry Kudlow goes on CNBC at 7:00 misinforming the American public about our oil situation. His mantra: “…drill drill drill….” By this he means that American oil companies should be permitted to drill on all the continental shelves offshore, up in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and anywhere else.

I agree ! We should drill drill drill — because once we give the go ahead for this, we will discover the hard way that it will not solve our oil problem. Here is what Matt Simmons recently wrote to me in an email:

It becomes irrelevant because this will never offset the depletion occurring throughout the world plus the steep fall-off in exports from Saudi Arabia, Mexico, Venezuela, Russia, and the North Sea that have already commenced. We also don’t have fifteen years to prop up the systems we are currently running for everyday life, including suburbia, Happy Motoring, the airline industry, Big Box Shopping, just-in-time food deliveries, air-conditioning places like Phoenix, Houston, Orlando, and Las Vegas, heating one-story sprawling centralized schools and fueling the yellow bus fleets that service them. . . . You get the picture? All this stuff is toast. And so is the economy that accompanies them. … Is there anything we can do?
   
 Of course… and I’ve repeated it a hundred times

• Rebuild the passenger rail system (and public transit at all scales) with electrification
• Prepare to re-inhabit our small cities and small towns, while decanting the suburbs and our supersized metroplexes
• Grow much more of our food locally around these places
• Rebuild local networks of retail and wholesale trade
• Prepare to resume manufacturing at smaller scales
• Raise interest rates to reward savings
• Do not waste alt.energy production on automobile use

(07/21/08)
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Timothy Wilken, MD writes: Synergy means working together — creating
together as in Co-Creation—laboring together as in Co-Laboration—acting
together as in Co-Action and operating together as in Co-Operation. The
goal of synergic union is to accomplish a larger or more difficult task
by working together than can be accomplished by working separately.

We invite individuals of integrity to join us in solving those
problems presently threatening our human society. We are seeking those
humans committed to co-Creating a world where I win, you win, others
win and the Earth wins, win-win-win-win.

If we wish to make the Earth safe for ourselves and our children, we
must solve our problems. But today’s problems are much too large to be
solved by any one individual, no matter how talented or brilliant he or
she might be. We need a community of minds whose mission is to solve
humanity’s big problems through co-Creation, co-Laboration, co-Action
and co-Operation. It is a complete waste of time to expect big
government, big business, or big religion to help us. They are the
problem. They are invested in a model of society that depends on
separation and scarcity. We need individuals of integrity to join with
us to build a new model of society that generates co-Operation and
abundance.

Working together, we humans can solve our problems. We can organize
a synergic thinktank to focus on those problems. We can use a system of
“Open co-Laboration” modeled after the “Open Source Software Community”that was used to create Linux. This is well described by Eric Steven Raymond in
his seminal paper The Cathedral and the Bazaar.

The CommUnity of Minds website can act as a virtual meeting place to co-Ordinate
a growing group of Co-Laborators who could join together in proposing,
defining, and refining solution candidates created to address various
aspects of the problems facing humanity.

This community of minds will seek Synergic Solutions .

Synergic means win-win-win-win. I win, you win, others win and
Earth wins. And, Solutions are the compliments to problems. The plural
term Solutions was chosen because there will never be any one solution
to the large problems we seek to solve. There will be many small
solutions that will work together to form a whole solution that is much
larger than the sum of the parts.(07/20/08)
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Al Gore speaks: There
are times in the history of our nation when our very way of life
depends upon dispelling illusions and awakening to the challenge of a
present danger. In such moments, we are called upon to move quickly and
boldly to shake off complacency, throw aside old habits and rise,
clear-eyed and alert, to the necessity of big changes. Those who, for
whatever reason, refuse to do their part must either be persuaded to
join the effort or asked to step aside. This is such a moment. The
survival of the United States of America as we know it is at risk. And
even more - if more should be required - the future of human
civilization is at stake.

If
you want to know the truth about gasoline prices, here it is: the
exploding demand for oil, especially in places like China, is
overwhelming the rate of new discoveries by so much that oil prices are
almost certain to continue upward over time no matter what the oil
companies promise. And politicians cannot bring gasoline prices down in
the short term.

So I ask you to
join with me to call on every candidate, at every level, to accept this
challenge - for America to be running on 100 percent zero-carbon
electricity in 10 years. It’s time for us to move beyond empty
rhetoric. We need to act now. (07/20/08)
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