... has clearly taken a beating!

Another huge factor in the coal issue is China, and their rapidly developing energy infrastructure.  Right now, 75% of the CO2 emitted in China comes from burning coal, and their energy use is expected to double by 2020.  Not only do we need to address our own coal use in the United States and in Europe, but we also need to put pressure on China and other developing economies to leapfrog past the traditional coal technologies and invest in cleaner, more modern generation facilities.  A moratorium here and in Europe would certainly set the precedent, but a growing China that continues to build 2 new power-plants a week could severely detract from any Western progress.

It makes me nervous to place so much emphasis on CCS when it appears to be an unproven technology.  Would we be better off spending the CCS billions on wind and solar-thermal?  Or is that just wishful thinking?  

CCS works from the point of view that it will prevent any new coal plants from being constructed, since they won't be cost competitive.

-- entropyproduction.blogspot.com

At Infp: the interesting thing about Hansen's stress on the need to develop CCS, is because CCS can be coupled to biomass, resulting in radical carbon-negative energy (energy that actively withdraws carbon-dioxide from the atmosphere and cleans up our past.)

Solar and wind - which add CO2 to the atmosphere - can never be scaled up fast enough to make a dent.

The difference between carbon-positive renewables and carbon-negative renewables is huge:

-solar: 100 to 150 gCO2eq/KWh
-wind: 30 to 50 gCO2eq/KWh
-biomass: 30 to 50 gCO2eq/KWh
-hydro: 15 to 30 gCO2eq/KWh
-nuclear: 10 to 20 gCO2eq/KWh
-biomass + CCS: -800 to -1000 gCO2eq/KWh (yes, that's right: minus, hence 'carbon-negative')

This is why Hansen is looking at technologies that withdraw CO2 from the atmosphere.

His list of priorities reads as follows:

-coal+CCS in order to facilitate
-a radical transition to biomass+CCS
-a transition from slash-and-burn to slash-and-char
-reforestation
-avoided deforestation

It's a matter of scaling things up fast enough. Wind and solar do not provide baseload power, so for the time being its irrealistic to attempt to build an economy on these intermittent source. You always need a baseload source to make society function. And the world's baseload power simply comes from coal, which is why you need an intervention there.

I am oppose to any outright ban on coal for new power plants. That would only push us to:

Keep using dirty old plants to meet daily load, keeping levels of SO2 and NOx high, plus much higher levels of CO2 per kW/h.

Dangerous technologies such as nuclear or carbon sequestration.

Better ideas include banning all electricity intensive uses and forcing users to use more efficient technologies such as co-generation. In particular the following use of electricity should be banned:

Electric Heat (use muni steam or private gas/oil heat)
Electric hot water (use muni steam or private gas/oil heat)
Air conditioning (buy back all privately owned air conditioners, recycle freon, replace with municipal steam or private gas/oil and absorption coolers)

Doing those four things, we could cut the grid by at least 1/5 and probably reduce our fossil fuel dependency by a 1/4.

Create a smart grid that avoids such high power peaks that force the dirtest plants online -- the same plants with the highest CO2 emissions.

Nycowboy,

What is dangerous about nuclear?