Features:
Coal and climate change – Can king coal clean up?

Under pressure from environmentalists, the coal industry and its supporters are claiming that their fuel can be clean. But do their claims stack up?

Environmentalists call it the “armpit of Washington”. The Capitol Power Plant generates the energy that steams and chills the water that circulates through a web of tunnels to heat and cool the Capitol, the Supreme Court, the Library of Congress and 19 other US government institutions. Its four smokestacks tower over densely populated and mostly poor neighbourhoods, belching sulphur dioxide, mercury, carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxide in a city that has repeatedly been found in violation of the Clean Air Act.

Half the energy generated by this century-old plant comes from coal, and it has been updated with advanced scrubbing technology. Still, other less polluting sources are available. Yet it is unlikely to be reconfigured any time soon. Its supporters – coal state politicians, many economists, and even some environmentalists – see the issue far differently.

“As we break the chains of foreign oil, our reliance on resources that we have here at home will only expand,” says a spokesman for Robert Byrd, a Democrat and chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, who was raised in the hardscrabble coalfields of southern West Virginia and helped block a proposal to phase out coal at the district’s only coal-fired plant. “Technologies are available today that can burn coal more cleanly and more efficiently.”

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Comments:

First Things First Deal With Yesterdays CO2 - nainoa ocean, 8 Mar 2009

While many international leaders work toward emission reduction strategies, carbon capture and storage notions, and even preparing for inevitable climate change, the real problem is not tomorrows CO2 but yesterdays CO2. We must turn our attention to the 1000+ gigatonne carbon bomb, two centuries of accumulating CO2, still mostly in the air as it takes centuries for airborne CO2 to equilibrate with the rest of the planet. Reports call the alarm of ocean acidification, adding acid flames to the raging fires of fossil CO2. What’s missing is mention of the best, only, means to fight ocean acidification and CO2 in the air.

Just 500 gigatonnes of yesterdays CO2 has reached the oceans where Revelle’s Rule tells us 80% of CO2 ends up. The first carbon bomb will be exploding in the ocean for more than a century even if we stop the emission of new CO2 today. No amount alternative energies, recycling, bicycling, or “clean coal” will tend to the first carbon bomb. Sure lets reduce the size of the second bomb but first things first. Here's how.

ONLY ocean replenishment and restoration can enlist, as allies, the most powerful force of nature - the ocean plants, the bloomin’ plankton. But high and rising CO2 in the air is not only responsible for ocean acidification worse it has fed green plants on land making them greener, bushier, and living longer making them "good ground cover." Ground cover improvements have reduced the amount of dust blowing in the winds by 1/3 in just a few decades. For the oceans dust in the wind brings vital mineral micro-nutrients, that terrestrial Yin (dust) is just as important as rain, the Yang, blowing from sea to land nurturing plant life. Since earth and ocean satellites went aloft 30 years ago we've measured decimation of ocean plants, 10% are gone from the Southern Ocean, 17% from the N. Atlantic, 26% from the N. Pacific, and 50% from the tropical seas. Just yesterday, a few decades past, ocean pastures grew more verdant consuming 4-5 billion tonnes more CO2 each year than today.

Today, as stewards of our blue planet, we must replenish ocean micro-nutrients to restore the verdant ocean pastures. If we bring the ocean plankton blooms back to levels seen only 30 years ago those plants will annually convert billions of tonnes of CO2 into ocean life instead of acid ocean death. Those verdant restored ocean pastures will deliver 7 times the CO2 reductions called for by the Kyoto Protocol.

To begin, and we must without delay, the work requires only tens of millions of dollars, to succeed in a matter of a decade requires only a few billion dollars. In the bargain the restored oceans will feed everything from tiny krill to the great whales and everything and everybody in between - fish, seabirds, penguins, seals and us.

Replenish and restore the oceans without delay. Read more at www.planktos-science.com