Regressing

It was a minor part of a forgettable speech, but President Bush touched on his second-favorite fossil fuel during Monday’s State of the Union Address: coal. “Let us fund new technologies that can generate coal power while capturing carbon emissions,” he said to applause.

How ironic then that the day after Bush’s soft-focus call to action, his Department of Energy pulled out of its signature “clean coal” project.

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Environmentalists suspected that FutureGen was little more than an expensive greenwashing tactic to delay real action to curb carbon emissions from coal. They’ve been proved partially right.

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Meanwhile, coal is cooking the planet. Hands-down, the black rock is the most carbon-intensive fuel for generating electricity available. Globally, coal power pumps almost 10 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year. More important, if all the plants on the drawing board are built they will, by 2030, emit more carbon than all the coal burned since the advent of the Industrial Revolution, according to Scientific American. That scenario will doom any effort to halt runaway climate change.

  Texas Observer

What do those scientists know anyway?

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.