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Can Coal Be Green?
wap writes "A coal-industry sponsored group, Americans for Balanced Energy Choices thinks coal is green, and has been running television ads to make its point. The ad shows an eagle unable to fly because of smog, and then talks about how much cleaner coal is now and will be in the future, with a sub-title saying that this is because of EPA regulation. Coal burning is much cleaner now than it was due to new scrubbing technologies, but it still emits just as much carbon dioxide as ever. Carbon emissions can be reduced by increased efficiency through gasification, but the only way to stop coal from emitting carbon dioxide is carbon sequestration. Everyone agrees that sequestration is expensive, but not everyone agrees that it's even effective in the long term. Should we instead follow the suggestion of James Lovelock and go nuclear as has been discussed here before?"
simply using less energy? Becoming a lot more energy efficient results in no decrease in the quality of life (actually, it improves quality of life), can be done using proven technologies, and creates jobs.
In different words: the answer is that we should neither build more nuclear plants nor more coal power plants because neither is necessary.
Coal *is* a clean renewable resource, it's just got a 100 million year cycle :-)
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
are X Prize-style competitions in the area of renewable energy research. i know it's not as cool as rocket ships, but energy will be a much larger world-wide issue than space flight in the next 50 years.
Sorry, but no. "Junk science" would be "science" shoehorned to fit a particular pre-determined point of view. The global warming research has in almost all cases not been of this nature. You might disagree with the conclusions and you certainly might not like them, but please don't insult the scientists involved because their results don't make you happy. If you want to pick apart their arguments carefully with your own data and models, you're welcomed to present these results at any number of conferences or in quite a few peer-reviewed journals. (And please don't try to fall back on the "I'll be censored" nonsense. If you could convincingly shoot down global warming, there are dozens of journals, starting with Science and Nature, that would trip overthemselves to print it. It'd be a coup to publish such a paper.)
On the other hand, if you want to talk about "junk science", you could look at the numerous cases where Washington has instructed scientists to change their conclusions to fit the administration's views. There are plenty of examples from the current administration, although I suspect that you could find some in almost any presidency. (The USSR was also quite fond of this sort of thing.)
Climate research is certainly tricky business and no one in the field pretends to have a total handle on how things work. However, we can say some things with pretty good confidence. That global warming is happening and that humans are responsible is one of them. Even the Bush administration, a group dead-set against dealing with the problem, has admitted this much. What we should do about it, exactly, is an entirely different question.
A coal-industry sponsored group, Americans for Balanced Energy Choices
Shouldn't their name be 'Americans for Coal Power'?
Never support a group that needs a mask.
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
Why nuclear? The U.S. could get more than 95% of its electricity demand from wind turbines on less than 3% of its farmland. The law of averages over the continent's grid smooths out the inherent unreliability of localized wind power, and the rest of the shaping can be taken care of with existing hydropower. There is no need for coal or nuclear.
Go on the web and find some videos of a long wall coal mining machine ripping out a few tons of coal a minute.
Now try to immagine growing that many tons of carbon fuel (in any form) per minute from corn oil, peanut oil, tree farms in the Northwest, whatever.
Biodisel is a good way of recycling oils and fats that are a by-product or would be thrown away. However, each McDonald's doesn't produce enough waste oil to fuel the truck that hauls the produce there, let alone all the cars in the drive through and the electricity coming over the wires.
Biodiesel is cool because it can give the resourceful person a way of not paying gas taxes and driving for free, and it can insulate you from political games that are played with gasoline prices. But it's not "the answer" to any of the big problems.
From the blurb:
The ad shows an eagle unable to fly because of smog, and then talks about how much cleaner coal is now and will be in the future, with a sub-title saying that this is because of EPA regulation
The great irony is that the coal industry fought tooth and nail to oppose these very regulations. They never would never be able to make these claims if it weren't for "those damn liberal treehuggers".
When farms are being abandoned because farm products are in surplus, destroying a mountain to make another field is waste several times over.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
It just seem sucudial to polute the air we breath fot the sake of the bottom line.
Welcome to Capitalism... where its all about the shareholder. If they don't make their money, they get mad. Its all about the "near term" problems.
There are only 10 kinds of people in this world... those who understand binary and those who don't
"This is what happened in California back in y2k... the company that owned the plants"
You must be talking about the regulated utilities. What you fail to understand is that, based on legislation passed, the regulated utilities were forced to sell off generation in order to create an energy market. In addition, the utilities were barred from entering into long term contracts. In addition, the utilities were forced (for a long time) to accept Cogeneration contracts, which far exceed the costs of conventional generation.
The problems in California were caused by high consumption, not passing costs on to consumers (to curb demand), no long term contracts for stability, and bad legislation which created a market that was capitalized on (assisted by the above conditions).