Comments pnprice has made

This is not good news!

I can understand the belief that we shouldn't be funding carbon sequestration because we should be funding solar or some other technology.  But the Administration did NOT announce that they're going to pull out of the FutureGen project and put the money into solar.  This hurts sequestration without helping anything else!

It's also ironic to see people (e.g. Roberts) who argue that sequestration is a bad idea because "it's always in the future", while arguing IN THE SAME POST that solar will be ready "ten or twenty years from now."   Solar has been just around the corner since I was a kid.  

I am a big fan of solar power --- indeed, just two weeks ago my wife and I signed the papers to install solar panels on our house, and we're expecting a call from the installer Any Day Now to come do it!  Go Solar!  But: there is no way that the trillions of dollars of coal infrastructure worldwide are going to be abandoned within the next twenty years.  Even if an alternative technology --- solar thermal electricity generation, for example --- were already cheaper than coal, it's not like all of the coal plants would be shut down by the end of the year. It would still take decades to build all of the replacement plants, and in the mean time those coal plants will still be spewing out CO2.  

So: (1) If they cut the sequestration project and put the money into some clean energy project instead, I could see celebrating, but that's not what they're doing, and (2) I disagree with the assertion that money spent on sequestration is wasted.

--Phil PriceOn Department of Energy backs away from funding Future posted 1 year, 9 months ago 12 Responses