MODERN TIMES
Art Hobson
ahobson@uark.edu
NWA Times 11 Apr 2009
Why big coal
should agree to a moratorium
Last
summer, Al Gore challenged America to decarbonize electricity within ten
years. He called for the nation to
switch by 2018 to non-carbon sources--wind, solar, and nuclear, along with
fossil fuel sources that capture and store their carbon emissions--to generate
all the nation's electricity.
Unrealistic? Probably. But not nearly as unrealistic as the fossil fuel industry's
business-as-usual plans. About 100
large new U.S. coal plants are on tap during the coming decade. If they are built, China, India, and
other nations will likewise go ahead with plans for some 1000 additional
plants. And if that happens the
planet will soon be at or near a point of no return beyond which we will
witness the unfolding of, in the words of NASA's leading climate scientist
James Hansen, "a whole new planet."
We
are rapidly approaching that point.
Scientists now warn that within five years the Arctic ocean's ice cap
will probably disappear during the summer. Whereas an icy Arctic ocean had
reflected 90 percent of summer sunlight, the ice-free ocean will absorb 90
percent. The great 2-mile-thick
Greenland ice sheet won't withstand this heat and will begin melting, raising
sea levels by a disastrous several feet in 2100 and by 25 feet within a few
centuries. A similar fate could be
in store for the West Antarctic ice sheet.
The
U.S. fossil fuel and automobile industries, working through their well-financed
propaganda organization known as the "Global Climate Coalition,"
managed to keep this information from the public for over a decade, but now the
cat's out of the bag. Scientists
are mostly terrible communicators, but they're finally getting global warming
across to the public, and the public is waking up. The Coalition has come undone. Only its former central player, ExxonMobil, still proclaims
to a rapidly vanishing audience that "global warming is a hoax."
I
promise you that global warming is in no way a scientific hoax. Scientists put their reputations on the
line every time they author a scientific paper. If they're wrong, other scientists will soon find them
out. Thousands of scientists have
published tens of thousands of serious, peer-reviewed papers on all aspects of
this issue and the evidence is, as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change puts it, "unequivocal" that global warming is happening and
it's caused by humans.
Unsurprisingly,
people are getting upset with big coal.
You can feel the indignation rising with every industry ad touting
"clean" coal, as though coal could possibly be clean so long as a
typical coal plant emits several million tons of carbon dioxide into the
atmosphere every year. You could
see this indignation expressed when Environmental Defense went up against the
TXU Corporation's eleven planned Texas coal plants, resulting in eight plant
cancellations with the remaining three receiving additional environmental
restrictions. Citizens demanding "no new coal plants" are taking a
toll on the industry. Of the 213
coal plants planned during 2007 and 2008, 129 are now cancelled, abandoned, or
on hold, 51 are still in the planning stage, and only 33 are under construction
or operating.
But
industry continues shooting itself in the foot by pursuing business as
usual. Business cannot continue as
usual, because global warming will continue rising and people will eventually
become so outraged they'll shut down the entire coal industry. Unless industry begins taking global
warming with the seriousness it deserves, the U.S. coal industry will find
itself in the situation that the U.S. nuclear power industry found itself in
after the 1979 Three Mile Island nuclear plant disaster: The public will effectively ban all new
coal plants.
Ironically,
the solution that will work best for the environment is also the solution that
will, in the long run, work best for the coal industry: A moratorium on all new coal plants
until carbon capture and storage (CCS, also called "sequestration")
is developed and used. It's not
known for certain that CCS will work, but the odds are strong that it
will. It will take ten years to
find out, and to begin installing it in new plants and retrofitting it into old
plants. A moratorium-until-sequestration
would actually combat global warming more effectively than an absolute ban on
all new plants because China and other nations will go ahead with coal no
matter what we do, and their plants will be unsequestered unless we demonstrate
the effectiveness of sequestration.
If we show the way with a moratorium until sequestration, other nations
will soon follow and eventually all coal plants will be sequestered globally,
reducing their carbon emissions by a factor of ten. You can learn more about the moratorium at cmnow.org.
There's
a precedent for industry acceptance of a moratorium. From 1973 until 1987 the U.S. chemical industry resisted
environmentalists' call for a ban on the "CFC" chemicals that were
destroying Earth's important high-altitude ozone. But in 1987 the evidence for ozone destruction became
unequivocal, and Dow and Dupont were wise enough to accept the science and join
the movement to ban CFCs worldwide.
Today, Dow and Dupont are profitably producing the CFC replacement chemicals
that do not harm high-altitude ozone.
A U.S. House bill by Henry Waxman calls for a moratorium until sequestration. The coal industry has not been willing to listen to science, and is proving tone-deaf to rising public anxiety. But for its own welfare, the industry should go Waxman's bill one better by declaring a self-imposed moratorium on coal until CCS is developed and used. Without such a moratorium, we're going to see a rising public clamor that will eventually stop the industry in its tracks.