Certain words and phrases seem to roll off the toungue. For some, when it comes to energy, “coal is indispensable” seems to be one of those terms. On 11 November, a Brookings Institution team released a “letter” to President-Elect Barack Obama and had a panel presentation in which these words just rolled from the keypad and rolled off the toungue. From the memo:
Coal is abundant, indispensable and—if carbon emissions continue unabated—devastating for the earth’s climate.
Simply put … huh?
We can, if we choose to, take a path to retire coal from our electrical grid. Truth be told, any reasonable cap and trade (or carbon tax) program will create the pressure to drive coal out of our system.
Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS) is, according to Brookings and others, simpy the only path forward or else we are accepting catastrophic climate change as inevitable. Considering that CCS is little more than powerpoint slides and hopeful promises, and, even it works, is simply an added cost to doing business to the extent that other power sources will be preferred.
Now, there is another option, isn’t there? Another priority, no? We can, instead, work to end coal as an electricity source of choice. As recently suggested, we could even have a retirement plan for coal plants, retiring them based on seniority, replacing them with clean energy sources as the coal plants head off into the sunset to enjoy a well-deserved retirement of rusting and obsolescence.