Re: SC73

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/21918521/big_coals_campaign_of_lies

Big Coal's Campaign of Lies

While its fuel cooks the planet, the coal industry uses its clout to dupe consumers and delay change

It took Congress more than three decades to consider a major initiative to ward off global warming, but only a few days to kill it. In June, the Senate rejected the Climate Security Act, which would have put America on track to slash greenhouse-gas emissions by 71 percent by 2050. The bill was specifically crafted to soften the blow to the nation's coal industry — coal generates more than a third of all carbon-dioxide pollution — by providing coal-burning power companies with $300 billion in subsidies and outright giveaways. But the lavish incentives did nothing to prevent Big Coal from going all out to defeat the measure; one industry-funded TV ad implied that if Congress passed the bill, "we may have to say goodbye to the American way of life." In the end, virtually every senator from a state where coal is mined or burned voted against the measure.

The fight over the climate bill underscores the biggest obstacle to ending America's self-destructive addiction to fossil fuels. Despite record profits, the oil industry knows the end is near and is madly diversifying into wind, solar and other energy sources. The auto industry, which has long opposed solutions to global warming, is so weakened by sinking profits and its shortsighted bet on SUVs that it's hardly a factor in the debate anymore. But coal knows that global warming represents the end of an era: There is simply no cost-effective way to burn coal without cooking the planet. The industry is currently blanketing the nation with ads for "clean coal," hoping to dupe consumers into thinking that coal is a 21st-century fuel, but it's all PR bullshit. At the moment, there is only one carbon-containment strategy that works for Big Coal: delay, delay, delay.

No one has been clearer about the urgency of getting the country off coal than James Hansen, the NASA climatologist widely respected as the godfather of modern climate science. At a recent briefing on Capitol Hill, Hansen touched off a political firestorm by arguing that the CEOs of leading coal companies like Peabody Energy are knowingly trashing the atmosphere to fatten the bottom line. "In my opinion," Hansen declared, "these CEOs should be tried for high crimes against humanity and nature."

To avert a climate disaster, Hansen believes we need nothing less than a complete phaseout of CO2 pollution from coal plants by 2030. Such a move would require a revolution that would make the Allied mobilization against Hitler during World War II seem like packing for summer camp. There are currently more than 600 coal-fired plants in the United States alone, which generate more than half the nation's electricity, and developing countries like China are throwing up a new coal plant every week. Perhaps someday a brilliant engineer will figure out a way to remove CO2 emissions cheaply and efficiently from coal plants. But for now, the only viable way to eliminate CO2 from coal plants is to shut them down.

Only five years ago, the coal industry and the Bush administration were assuring us that newfangled coal plants would soon eliminate climate-warming pollution. In 2003, the Department of Energy launched a $1 billion partnership with the coal industry to develop a coal plant with near-zero emissions called FutureGen, which was scheduled to be operational by 2012. In a letter to President Bush, a group of CEOs from the coal and electric power industries also suggested that coal gasification plants, a new kind of coal plant that can capture CO2 emissions and store them underground, would be ready between 2008 and 2010.

Fast forward to today. Earlier this year, after spending for FutureGen had nearly doubled to $1.8 billion, the Department of Energy ditched the project, citing cost overruns. And despite the promises from coal CEOs, not a single new coal gasification plant is in operation in the U.S. In fact, not a single coal plant of any type in America, new or old, is currently capturing and storing a single ton of CO2 underground. In June, Jim Rogers, the CEO of Duke Energy, one of the largest coal-burning utilities in America, admitted at an electric-power-industry conference that carbon capture and storage has been oversold as "a magical technology that solves the carbon problem for coal plants.".................

Wise choices no. Continue to party yes! Its all about trying to maintain, no matter what are the consequences, " business as usual " for the rich countries and the rich people of this world.