Guest Post by Ira Glickstein
The December 2010 issue of the Atlantic shows an amazing turn-around by some of the Global Warming warmists! Yes, they are still tuned in to the CAGW crowd predicting imminent climate change disaster, but … BUT, some have reversed themselves on their previous ‘ol devil coal! Turns out we need coal to generate Watts of electricity for our electric cars and, they say, we can do it in a way that is environmentally correct.
The cover story, by respected author James Fallows, is titled Why the Future of Clean Energy is Dirty Coal. {Click the link to read it free online.}
Recall that, only last year, a leading alarmist, NASA’s James Hansen, one of the key science advisors on Al Gore’s The Inconvenient Truth movie, wrote:
“..coal is the single greatest threat to civilization and all life on our planet. … The dirtiest trick that governments play on their citizens is the pretense that they are working on ‘clean coal’… The trains carrying coal to power plants are death trains. Coal-fired power plants are factories of death.”
Fallows writes:
“To environmentalists, ‘clean coal’ is an insulting oxymoron. But for now, the only way to meet the world’s energy needs, and to arrest climate change before it produces irreversible cataclysm, is to use coal—dirty, sooty, toxic coal— …”
Amazingly, while atmospheric CO2 is still the bogeyman of what alarmists say is an imminent Global Warming disaster, coal, which is nearly all carbon and generates CO2 when burned as intended, is part of the solution! Fallows writes:
Before James Watt invented the steam engine in the late 1700s—that is, before human societies had much incentive to burn coal and later oil in large quantities—the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was around 280 parts per million, or ppm … By 1900, as Europe and North America were industrializing, it had reached about 300 ppm.
Now the carbon-dioxide concentration is at or above 390 ppm, which is probably the highest level in many millions of years. “We know that the last time CO2 was sustained at this level, much of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets were not there,” Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Penn State, told me. Because of the 37 billion annual tons of carbon-dioxide emissions, the atmospheric carbon-dioxide level continues to go up by about two ppm a year. For perspective: by the time today’s sixth-graders finish high school, the world carbon-dioxide level will probably have passed 400 ppm, and by the time most of them are starting families, it will have entered the 420s. …
Michael Mann told me. “What we have with rising CO2 levels in general is a dramatically increasing probability of serious and deleterious change in our climate.” He went down the list: more frequent, severe, and sustained heat waves, like those that affected Russia and the United States this summer; more frequent and destructive hurricanes and floods; more frequent droughts, like the “thousand-year drought” that has devastated Australian agriculture; and altered patterns of the El Niño phenomenon, which will change rainfall patterns in the Americas. …
You should recognize Michael Mann as the creator of the deceptive “hockey stick curve” at the center of many of the Climategate emails. (See this and this and this and this.) Note also the standard line that, whatever happens to the weather: hotter, colder, dryer, wetter, stormy, calm, sunny, cloudy, … whatever, it is all due to high CO2 levels (even if they don’t plow your streets after a blizzard :^)
So, what is the solution? Fallows writes:
Isn’t “clean energy” the answer? Of course—because everything is the answer. The people I spoke with and reports I read differed in emphasis, sometimes significantly. Some urged greater stress on efficiency and conservation; some, a faster move toward nuclear power or natural gas; some, an all-out push for solar power and other renewable sources …
Note the mention of nuclear, also a bogeyman of the green crowd until a few years ago. In this regard much of the world is ahead of us. When I bicycled in France a few years ago, you could see nuclear power plant cooling towers in much of the countryside (except near Paris – I guess that is where the professional environmentalists live) and France generates most of its electricity using nuclear energy. It will take the US quite a while to catch up, but it is good to see a mainstream liberal literary magazine starting to lead the way. The above paragraph also mentions natural gas, a fossil fuel, ahead of “solar power and other renewable sources” stuck in at the end. It seems they finally realize that we need energy and, at least for the next decades, it will continue to be coal, burned in a cleaner way, plus nuclear and natural gas.
Fallows continues:
“Emotionally, we would all like to think that wind, solar, and conservation will solve the problem for us,” David Mohler of Duke Energy told me. “Nothing will change, our comfort and convenience will be the same, and we can avoid that nasty coal. Unfortunately, the math doesn’t work that way.”…
Coal will be with us because it is abundant: any projected “peak coal” stage would come many decades after the world reaches “peak oil.” It will be with us because of where it’s located: the top four coal-reserve countries are the United States, Russia, China, and India, which together have about 40 percent of the world’s population and more than 60 percent of its coal. …
“I know this is a theological issue for some people,” Julio Friedmann of Lawrence Livermore said. “Solar and wind power are going to be important, but it is really hard to get them beyond 10 percent of total power supply.” …
What would progress on coal entail? The proposals are variations on two approaches: ways to capture carbon dioxide before it can escape into the air and ways to reduce the carbon dioxide that coal produces when burned. In “post-combustion” systems, the coal is burned normally, but then chemical or physical processes separate carbon dioxide from the plume of hot flue gas that comes out of the smokestack. Once “captured” as a relatively pure stream of carbon dioxide, this part of the exhaust is pressurized into liquid form and then sold or stored. …
“Pre-combustion” systems are fundamentally more efficient. In them, the coal is treated chemically to produce a flammable gas with lower carbon content than untreated coal. This means less carbon dioxide going up the smokestack to be separated and stored.
Either way, pre- or post-, the final step in dealing with carbon is “sequestration”—doing something with the carbon dioxide that has been isolated at such cost and effort, so it doesn’t just escape into the air. … All larger-scale, longer-term proposals for storing carbon involve injecting it deep underground, into porous rock that will trap it indefinitely. In the right geological circumstances, the captured carbon dioxide can even be used for “enhanced oil recovery,” forcing oil out of the porous rock into which it is introduced and up into wells.
According to Fallows, China is in the lead on this clean coal technology, with help from American and other western corporations. While it is good that at least some of the Global Warming alarmists are warming up to coal as a necessary part of the solution, it would be better IMHO, if they were also more realistic about the actual dangers of climate change and the likelihood (again IMHO) that most of the warming of the past century is due to natural cycles not under human control and that we are likely already in a multi-decade period of stable temperatures, and perhaps a bit of cooling.
Yes, I think we need to do something about the unprecedented steady rise in CO2 levels, but we have to do it is a way that will not destroy our economies or force us to drastically reduce our lifestyles. One thing I agree with James Hansen about is that an across-the-board carbon tax, assessed equally against all sequestered fuels (coal, oil, natural gas) and collected at the mine, well, or port, is the best solution, far more suitable to the task than the “cap and trade” political scam, and more likely to work.
Rather than have governments pick winners (and mess up as they did with corn ethanol subsidies that raised food prices and reduced gas mileage without doing much to control CO2 emissions) I prefer to tax carbon progressively a bit more each year and let industry and other users decide for themselves how to adapt to the higher prices. Nothing stimulates action and invention like saving your own money. Nothing wastes money like government taking money from “Mr. A” and giving it to “Mr. B” for the “good of society”.
I’m working on a future posting that will propose use of gassified coal along with enhanced CO2 farming as a clean coal implementation that may make sense in a decade or so. I hope to post it next week.
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Another story in the same issue of the Atlantic is about famed physicist Freeman Dyson and The Danger of Cosmic Genius.{Click the link to read it free online.}
They write:
In the range of his genius, Freeman Dyson is heir to Einstein—a visionary who has reshaped thinking in fields from math to astrophysics to medicine, and who has conceived nuclear-propelled spaceships designed to transport human colonists to distant planets. And yet on the matter of global warming he is, as an outspoken skeptic, dead wrong: wrong on the facts, wrong on the science. How could someone as smart as Dyson be so dumb about the environment?
Does it occur to them that the CAGW warmists and alarmists may be the ones who are wrong?
Every engineer with a pencil, paper and cup of coffee knew before all the high school silliness that it is preposterous to contemplate replacing coal with windmills and solar panels. It took letting these well meaning world changers spending 100s Billions, bankruptcy of Spain, and the dismal performance of these alternatives to demonstrate TO THEM that fossil fuels were here until we can replace them with nuclear. Why do we entertain this kind of destructive nonsense. See the many posts on this in the archives of this site.
The delivered price of steam coal varies widely by geographic location. From 70 cents/MMBtu in Wyoming to $4/MMBtu on the US Eastern Seaboard to $5.00/MMBtu in European Ports and $5.50 /MMBtu in Asian ports.
Clean Coal doesn’t economically stack up against nuclear power for base load at a coal price of $4+/MMBtu assuming that nuclear power is an available option.
At the moment, global nuclear power industrial capacity is quite sad. A dozen reactors/year globally is about all we can build, up from 4/year in 2008.
The industry is expanding but not as fast as China’s power needs, hence the Chinese are burning coal in the most efficient coal plants they can get.
Clean coal is nothing more than improving ‘boiler efficiencies’. And the USA is in the lead doing just that. There is now an operating ‘clean coal’ power plant in the USA, using the latest in coal technology, state-of-the-art integrated coal gasification combined-cycle (IGCC) power plant in the surprising cold state of Florida. We need all the heat we can get.
Thanks Bush, for investing in America’s future, not destroying it. The link is here
I wonder why no one knows? It’s also interesting to note the coal burn efficiency, from the normal 30-35% to over 50%. A really big deal. Interesting read.
And can we see those China operating power plants?
A question, when co2 was 390 or above many millions of years ago there was no ice in Greenland. The question is was Greenland where it is almost today or was it somewhere else those many millions of years ago. Thanks Allan
Ira:
Carbon sequestration is not about climate change. It is about pricing coal-fired electricity out of the market, and that is about reducing electricity use, and that is about reducing quality of life in the U.S. and Europe, and that is about reducing population levels, and now you have gotten to the Malthusian core of the environmental agenda. Reject the agenda and coal is just dandy without any kind of carbon capture.
brad says:
December 31, 2010 at 12:37 am
“It is not a right wing meme so it will never get any play here,[…]”
Oh, and thanks for denouncing everybody else’s ideas as “right wing memes”.
Brad says:
December 31, 2010 at 5:19 am
“You are truly an idiot on the MidAmerican Energy quote above, I will take Berkshire Hathway and Warren Buffeet’s business acumen (he owns MidAmerican) over your misguided Koch Brother’s addled head any day.”
I see that you really are an expert in making friends.
I just had a crazy idea for the next irrational environmentalist fear. If we start sequestering CO2 from the burning of coal then we will deplete the oxygen in the atmosphere to the point that all animal life on the earth will asphyxiate. Oh my god its worse than anyone had ever thought we’re all going to die. And with that weird thought I want to wish everyone a happy and preposterous New Year.
Not only have you Americans got unlimited amounts of Shale gas available but are sitting on huge amounts of oil. The Russians have worked it out that oil does not in fact derive from compressed organic matter …and is constantly being replenished from deep underground..they are drilling deeper [on land] ..isn’t it amazing that after WW2 they had very little oil..soon they will have the largest reserves.There is no such thing as peak oil!! Just get rid of the green socialists and provide yourselves with unlimited cheap energy!!
Yes it’s true, clean coal generated electricity, what a word for better boilers, does not compare with nuclear power. The same TECO-FPL operates nuclear generation at Turkey Point Florida and during their recent rate increase hearing they stated that nuclear costs have remained mostly ‘fixed’ and were about 1/3 of conventional coal. But they also try and burden the nuclear costs with every trick they can, like heat for manatees, so no one notices how cheap base load nuclear power really is.
But it does not appear the Obama regime is interested in doing anything, but driving up American customers electricity costs. The one campaign promise he seems to be keeping. That and heating the non-native species of manatees we have around here in south Florida. The manatees are freezing, I guess that is what is meant by the ‘limits of their native range’.
Words mean things, just not what you think they do.
So in a few words, nuclear power makes sense for America, clean coal makes sense for places like electricity free Africa — LOL.
Have you seen the latest in nuclear power plant construction? Well it would be in America if the government would approve of it. Building nuclear power plant’s critical sub-assembly parts on a fixed location prefab assembly line, and then drastically minimizing the onsite build costs, is the goal.
A chart at this link shows the worldwide nuclear power plants under construction. The USA currently has zero, China has 25 — hmmm see the problem with the country with the highest corporate tax rates in the world?
Modular prefab nuclear power plant construction, improves quality, reliability and reduces deployment time.
No offense, but this post (as well as the Atlantic article before it) seems like an awfully wordy way of saying “Some people think carbon sequestration will be more important than renewable energy for reducing CO2 emissions.” Is that supposed to be controversial?
Re the question: why are they so against coal?
From what I can make out of the history it appears to have been a two party interest from around the 70’s. It began in the 30’s with the fledgling environmental movement against dirty coal (dirty coal someone explained in a post above), because of the production of ash, and this was won by the greenies and the dark satanic mills scenarios and deadly smogs in London became a thing of the past. A rational environmental triumph to a process that had been in the making in the UK in the centuries before – when work on measuring and monitoring CO2 levels was really taken seriously and vast amount of data gathered, (later ignored by Callendar and Keeling).
Greenie scientists around the 30’s latched on to the still unproven hypothesis that CO2 was a ‘greenhouse’ gas which would warm the planet and extrapolating from there realised they could get a scare going against coal from another angle, (coupled with greenie scares that we were stripping the earth of its resources concerns, and the eugenic minded overpopulation relative to resources). This is when Revelle and Callendar types began promoting the scare for the greenies, in the fifties bringing in Keeling to prove that man was producing more CO2 than the earth could use and which would lead to the gross runaway warming of the planet and melting of ice caps and flooding as per the scenario devised in the 30’s. However, creeping up around them in the fifties the rising temperatures from the end of the LIA began to reverse, and they eventually woke up to the fact that they were actually in a period of global cooling.
In the 70’s Hansen was pushing the line that coal burning was a danger to the earth’s climate from the ash blocking out sunlight and extrapolating from the global cooling reverse began pushing the line that continued and increasing burning would lead to another ice age. The bandwagon greenies scientists soon changed the global disaster mantra to this line. But yet again they were caught wrong-footed, not noticing that this time global temperature rises were already in play around them. Once again they had to reverse the mantra, to promote again the earlier doomsday cataclysmic scenario first devised in the earlier decades of the movement. (I did find a page which analysed the changing Hansen graphs accompanied by his changes of message from ice age to runaway oven, but not sure where it is now, I posted it some time ago on tips and notes for record.)
While it appears from this that Hansen is of the original greenie type, I think he may not be. In the 70’s other interested parties against coal appeared realising they could use the greenie campaign for their own ends, primarily Maggie Thatcher who is credited with starting the global warming scare by taking the message global.
Her interests against coal more complex than the greenies and I’m not sure of what all these were. In the following bear in mind that the Tory capitalists’ interests are in paying the least amount of money to those producing the wealth for their employers.
Certainly against coal because the previous Tory government she had been in had been brought down by the coal industry union. Maggie’s political attacks against the coal industry once she came into power were directed to utterly destroying the industry itself and the union that brought her party’s government down would die with it. But also resentful that unions in general could wield such power over government she attacked all unions as they came to the fore with grievances during her period in office, the nurses, firemen, teachers – she was quite successful in keeping them squashed down in great part by generating popular displeasure with them (this was recently repeated in the BA strike). The smearing was done by presenting them as irresponsible money grabbers to the detriment of the people for which they provided their services; of playing with life and death in the fight against nursing and firemen unions, in not caring for children who would be deprived of education because of their greed in the case of teachers. In the latter we had the absurd spectacle of one of the richest men in England who sent his children to an ordinary local non fee paying public school joining in the successful government campaign to demonise the teachers. While he was sitting in his very expensive car after driving his children to the school gates, one of the striking teachers on the picket line handed him a pamphlet which explained their reasons for striking. He rolled down the window and accepted the pamphlet then tore it into pieces and contemptuously dropped these on the ground in front of the teacher, without reading it. This was Paul McCartney.
To this her end game in destroying union power over government are added her interests in promoting nuclear power, which was declared by saying Britain shouldn’t be vulnerable, in a position to be held to ransom over oil supplies from the Middle East. With North Sea oil this lost its force and sort of faded into the background, and in the greater scheme of things, which was beginning to harness the energy of the Greens against coal and who were vehemently against nuclear power, this was put on the back-burner – a milk-sop, an apparent win for the Greens.
She began to seriously promote oil interests against coal. Setting up the Hadley Centre and CRU being set up with oil money, they went all out to promote the scare that coal was the cause of the returned disaster by global warming scare. And it was at this time CRU went to New Zealand to begin the task and first step of manipulating temperature records world wide. This was now big business scaremongering and resources were available beyond the dreams of the early greenies in the 30’s, against air pollution from coal..
Around this time Hansen changed from scaremongering global cooling to scaremongering global warming, in each phase specifically being against coal itself. Is he a fanatic die hard Greenie of the old school? His ‘death train’ scenario would make it appear so, but his interests, even before Maggie’s changed to supporting oil profits against the much cheaper coal production, could have similar reasons in the background. I don’t know, haven’t explored it.
This is how it appears to me a ‘general’ reader of history, whether Maggie’s antics re reversal from promoting nuclear against oil were actually before North Sea or some kind of double bluff to get the Greens off her back, they were very vocal at the time especially with Sellafield/Windscale, because oil supply from the Middle East was more in their control than they let on, I don’t know. What is sure is that it was oil interest money against coal which set up the research during the seventies to manipulate temperature data. The double bluff here is that at the same time they began promoting the idea that it was oil interests against coal which was denying the faked data the oil interests against coal were producing..
Taking it globally took the next couple of decades of political manoevering, the turning point to ‘consensus’ came in the early nineties and the change pinpointed to the ’94 IPCC report (from memory, I think that’s the date), when the message from research changed between publication of the summary and final publication of all the report.
The crucial paragraph concluding that anthropogenic cause of global warming was not a player, was excised and the ‘reckless man’ demonisation blame for it began to be promoted with a gusto we’re still living through. The change to the IPCC report was at the same time as Mann came into prominence at the IPCC and the getting rid of the old guard whose paragraph conclusion was obliterated as efficiently as Mann obliterated the LIA and MWP with his hockey stick.
NB. I am not an historian, all dates should be checked for flow of events, but I think I’ve got the gist of it.
Hansen may be one of these earlier ones with not so obvious interests since his ranting began in the global cooling scare campaign years, while those coming on board as the mantra changed to warming
[Myrrh says “I am not an historian, all dates should be checked for flow of events…” I (Ira) have high regard for PM Thatcher and wish to disassociate myself from what appears to me to be somewhat confused political spin. Ira]
Brad says:
December 31, 2010 at 12:37 am
Obama supports clean coal. He also supports nukes.
It is not a right wing meme so it will never get any play here, but MidAmerican Energy gets 20% of its energy from wind, and just signed agreements to take that to 25% – additionally they have not had a rate increase since 1995 and they have pledged none through at least 2014.
Really!? No rate hikes until 2014?
Please, do be a dove and tell us of how much, in USD, these wind energy plants have been subsidized by DC.
So, in essence, I–and every other US taxpayer–are subsidizing your rate freeze. Wow, that is truley economical—for you.
All they know is what they want and a double standard works fine for them.
For example:
Environmentalists want to deny US citizens access to some public lands to preserve nature but are OK with illegal aliens from Mexico trashing the entire Southwest. PETA kills the animals they save but oppose hunting. Environmentalists have burned expensive new cars and houses to protest the use of energy while themselves putting the very smoke they are blowing into the atmosphere. They promoted air bags in cars that injure and kill and to cover they tell you to put the kid in the back seat, denying you the right to determine what is best for your child. You know the back seat where you can’t attend to him or her without getting out of the car.
They all seem to be cut from the same cloth. So is it any wonder they are willing to fudge on conventional power generation technology to get the electric cars that are as useless as wind and solar for stand alone power generation. They pretend that power sources that consume tax dollars are better than sources that generate revenue. Years ago they called that nuts.
And one of the smartest scientists in the world who denies warming is wrong and dumb on the environment. The Atlantic is entering Pulitzer territory or is it Nobel.
By the way all my vehicles run on electricity by way of the spark plug.
‘Scuse the editing.
I would like to comment on the previously mentioned issues regarding coal gasification/liquefaction and the energy needed for the process. It seems to me that a nuclear plant could be built next to the coal processing plant which would provide the heat and energy for processing the coal, and it could split up the water into the needed hydrogen and oxygen.
General Electric has been working on a new type of nuclear reactor called an Integral Fast Reactor (IFR), and it has myriad advantages/benefits over the current Light Water Reactor plants including cost, simplicity, and safety. And it can be fuelled by the plutonium waste we now have. I believe GE is working with the NRC now in the IFR licensing phase. Wouldn’t the IFR be good for coal processing?
As a matter of fact, I do not favor artificial re-sequestration of carbon. Wait till my next Guest Post, in about a week, for the brilliant (if I have to say so myself :^) conceptual solution.
Brad says:
December 31, 2010 at 5:19 am
You seem to be practicing the “I can’t respond to the argument, so I’ll attack the non-argument game”.
Ralph’s point is well taken. Wind power at most has a 30% utilization factor (and I’m being generous). MidAmerican Energy’s stated 20% wind capacity (actually, its 20% “renewables”, which includes hydro and biofuels, but you probably knew that) works out to well below the the magic grid stability number of 10%, above which wind power would destabilize the grid. Its total capacity is about 75% fossil fuels (about 2:1 coal:natural gas). Since these utilization factors are much higher than wind, well over 80% of MidAmerican Energy’s electricity generation is from fossil fuels.
Warren is indeed a smart man.
http://www.midamericanenergy.com/aboutus1.aspx
Further to my previous post ref the origin of oil see http://www.enviroliteracy.org/article.php/1130.html
Lazy Teenager,
The ANG (Coal Gasification) Plant in central North Dakota is actively sequestering CO2 today, by piping it into southern Saskatchewan where it is injected into depleted Oil Wells, repressurizing them for tertiary oil recovery. Looks like a Win/Win to me, if atmospheric release of CO2 is in fact a problem.
On a related note you might want to check out the Bakken and Three Forks formations, insiders tell me there are several more that haven’t received any attention yet.
Todaloo dude this old guy’s got to get back to work.
I clicked the linkyou gave to Climate Progress http://climateprogress.org/ and noticed that the article was supported by a picture of a cooling tower with dark smoke coming from it. I blogged,and pointed out that cooling towers only emit steam not smoke and that the steam in the picture looked as if it had be photoshopped to look darker like smoke. Unfortunately the moderators didn’t feel my comments were worthy of approval. Power station cooling towers are often shown as emitting smoke from their cooling towers when it is in fact steam, and I feel everyone should point this out to the misleading AGW enthusiasts when they inaccurately use this type of pictorial support for their articles.
Carbon capture is absurd. Releasing CO2 to the biosphere is very beneficial for all.
“The trains carrying coal to power plants are death trains. ”
What lovely dinner conversationalists these people must be. What’s with all the holocaust references from the CAGW crowd (i.e. ‘denier’, coal ‘death trains’)?
To somehow consider an article that James Fallows writes as significant is pure folly. He is simply a talented wordsmith who has never had an original thought in years. Go read any of his previous drivel in The Atlantic. 20 Years ago he was the leading voice of the “Japan is going to clobber us” gang, completely ignoring the structural weaknesses of Japan’s planned economy. He is simply a New-Deal progressive who has never met a government-planned program that he didn’t love. “Clean Coal” is simply the latest of his faddish interests in a government program that will “save us.”
I’ll take the coal, but you can keep the electric car.