MODERN TIMES
Art Hobson
ahobson@uark.edu
NWA Times 3 January
2009
A moratorium on
coal plants
Is Fayetteville a great pro-sustainability town or what? Just consider the Downtown Master Plan, City Plan 2025, our sensitive city planning staff, the trash recycling program, our trails, our many sustainability awards, the Eva Klein & Associates economic development strategy emphasizing sustainability as our "niche of competency," and our four pro-environment candidates for mayor this fall. What could be better?
And now comes Mayor Coody with a city council resolution on global warming. I'm not normally a big fan of city council resolutions on national issues, but there are and should be exceptions. In this green city with a mostly green council, it's appropriate that our mayor, who has been actively concerned about this issue for years, proposed this resolution. It passed 7-1.
The resolution proclaims that Fayetteville supports a moratorium on the construction of new coal-fired power plants in Arkansas. This is just right. Here's why.
Hundreds of knowledgeable climate scientists have expressed alarm about polar ice cap melting. Arctic ocean sea ice has plummeted for years and is approaching (or may have passed) a tipping point beyond which total loss is inevitable. Once the sea ice goes, Greenland ice might be close behind because ice has a much higher reflectivity than ocean water. So a watery Arctic exposed to the summer sun absorbs far more energy than an icy Arctic. This causes more melting, which causes more absorption, and so forth--a vicious circle. Some scientists think the kilometers-thick Greenland ice sheet, if surrounded by a watery Arctic, will not survive. If the ice sheet goes, so will the world's great coastal cities: Sea levels will rise several meters by 2100 or 2200.
There
are other nasty instabilities, and there's a similar problem in the
Antarctic. Many scientists,
including NASA's James Hansen, head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space
Studies, have authored peer-reviewed scientific papers expressing alarm about
this threat. Their first
recommendation is a moratorium on coal-fired power plants until they can
sequester their carbon.
Carbon
capture and storage (CCS, or "sequestration") technology is being
intensely pursued by coal companies and energy labs. The hope is that, before burning, coal can be turned into an
energy-rich gas, carbon dioxide (CO2) can be extracted from that gas and stored
permanently underground, and most of the energy (now in the form of hydrogen
gas) can then be released by burning.
This will raise the price of coal-generated electricity and is not
expected to be ready for at least ten years.
Although
it's uncertain whether CCS will ever be ready, we must hope for its success
because without it China and other nations will continue using unsequestered
coal. CCS and a coming
government-imposed CO2 cap-and-trade system will impose appropriate costs on
coal, which has until now been allowed to escape its so-called "external"
environmental costs. This will
help level the playing field for other energy sources such as wind and
solar.
The
call for a moratorium on coal has become a national movement. Representative Henry Waxman has
introduced a bill imposing a national moratorium. In Arkansas, Judge David Newbern--the dissenter in the
Public Service Commission's 2-to-1 decision to grant the planned Turk plant
near Texarkana permission to operate--and the Governor's Commission on Global
Warming have called for a similar measure.
Arkansas
environmentalists were blind-sided by the Turk plant and by another new plant
near Osceola. The Osceola plant
was approved and the Turk plant was well along toward approval before most of
us woke up to the issue. Other
nearby planned plants include Shady Point 2 just over the Oklahoma border near
Fort Smith, and Hugo 2 in southeastern Oklahoma. A plant near Sallisaw, Oklahoma, was recently defeated by
economics and local opposition.
New
plants need to be stopped until they are sequestered. The national environmental movement should strike a tacit
bargain with electricity suppliers:
Industry should agree to no new unsequestered coal-fired plants, while
environmentalists should encourage CCS research and demonstration CCS power
plants. It's a healthy bargain for
both parties.
About
100 new coal plants are planned for the U.S. during the next decade, and 1000
for the world. The main quick
alternative is energy efficiency.
The Commission on Global Warming recommended that Arkansas do as several
other states are doing and make "demand-side management" a
responsibility of utility companies.
The idea is that utilities help their customers finance and install such
cost-saving efficiencies as improved insulation. Utilities are then reimbursed with rate increases. Paradoxically, this saves customers'
money because total energy use declines so much that customer bills are cheaper
despite the higher rates. The
reason this works is that America's energy use is so bloated that there's a fortune
to be made in energy efficiency.
Over the longer term, there are many new and innovative forms of
renewable energy. Read Fred
Krupp's book Earth: The Sequel for
descriptions of a fascinating assortment of these.
America
needs to lead the way in imposing a moratorium on coal until CCS is ready. If America leads, the Chinese will not
be far behind, and probably India as well. When the U.S. and Europe set stringent limits on particulate
emissions from coal plants, and again when these countries regulated sulfur
dioxide emissions, China soon followed.
But they expect the more advanced countries to move first.
I've
studied enough of the science on this to be certain that there is a significant
risk of catastrophic sea-level rise if we go ahead with all the planned
unsequestered coal plants. It's a
risk we simply cannot take, and that we need not take.