Without clean coal, avoiding abrupt climate change or runaway global warming by cutting emissions is unfeasible:

"The vast majority of new power stations in China and India will be coal-fired; not "may be coal-fired"; will be. So developing carbon capture and storage technology is not optional, it is literally of the essence." --"Breaking the Climate Deadlock," Tony Blair, June 26, 2008

But:

Vaclav Smil, an energy expert at the University of Manitoba, has estimated that capturing and burying just 10 percent of the carbon dioxide emitted over a year from coal-fire plants at current rates would require moving volumes of compressed carbon dioxide greater than the total annual flow of oil worldwide -- a massive undertaking requiring decades and trillions of dollars. "Beware of the scale," he stressed."

"Way too little and way too late," runs the refrain, followed by the claim that nothing less than an 80% reduction in emissions by the year 2050 will suffice - what I call the "80 by 50" target. Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have endorsed it. John McCain is not far behind, calling for a 65% reduction...By the year 2050, the Census Bureau projects that our population will be around 420 million. This means per capita emissions will have to fall to about 2.5 tons in order to meet the goal of 80% reduction.  It is likely that U.S. per capita emissions were never that low - even back in colonial days when the only fuel we burned was wood. The only nations in the world today that emit at this low level are all poor developing nations, such as Belize, Mauritius, Jordan, Haiti and Somalia."  --"The Real Cost of Tackling Climate Change," WSJ

"I'm going to tell you something I probably shouldn't: we may not be able to stop global warming. We need to begin curbing global greenhouse emissions right now, but more than a decade after the signing of the Kyoto Protocol, the world has utterly failed to do so. Unless the geopolitics of global warming change soon, the Hail Mary pass of geoengineering might become our best shot." --Bryan Walsh, Time Magazine, 17 March 2008.

There is a very inexpensive simple way to immediately cool the Earth: just put a small amount of aerosol into the air to dim the sun. We won't be able to stop rapid ecosystem collapse without geoengineering.

This essay's basic premise is wrong.  All fuels emit something when burned, and the LEAST toxic of those is CO2.  The fantasy that all we have to do is replace fossil fuels with other fuels and everything will be fine is something I've complained about ad nauseam, including in Grist, because of its dangerous potential to convince people that they don't have to do anything meaningful.  The fantasy that replacing fossil fuels alone will save us is just that, as other fuels will also emit pollutants, including greenhouse gases like CO2.

Even if everyone in the U.S. changed light bulbs, recycled half the total waste, cut driving in half, installed low-flow showerheads, and adjusted thermostats by two degrees, the result would be a ONE-TIME 21% reduction in carbon emissions which, given the current rate of U.S. growth, would be offset in 10 years.  (At least cutting driving in half would be going in the right direction.)  What's needed are fundamental changes in the ways we live, not substitution of one harmful technology or fuel with another that seems less harmful at the moment.

Even if all vehicles were electrically powered and all the electricity came from solar collectors and wind generators placed where the vehicles were stored, the problems created by roads and driving, not to mention the consumption of materials needed to build the solar collectors and wind generators, would still exist.

nobody knows if they could bring tame a runaway situation, nobody knows how practical they would be or how basically effective, nobody knows what side effects they would cause -- and yet -- every climate yahoo on earth is ready to jump on the bandwagon.

but the proven cost benefits of energy efficiency, the plummeting price of solar, and the thousands of modern wind turbines in affordable, practical operation today -- aren't enough to change their minds about clean tech's effectiveness, or the possibility of serious and fast pollution reduction through real effort.

and then they come back again and again with the same sucker's bluff, show their cards, lose the hand -- but they didn't bet any money -- so they didn't lose any money -- which means:

they won!

but hey, the booby prize is still a prize, right.

You're so right. The same people who scoff at the idea that we could shift to renewable power and efficiency -- as though that's a technical project only an advanced species of alien could possibly pull off -- express no compunctions whatever about our ability to directly meddle with the atmosphere on a global scale.

People love big toys ...

grist.org

Please explain how burning non-fossil fuels will not contribute to global warming, considering that those fuels also emit CO2 in an absolute best case scenario.  And please don't repeat the industry lie that because the crops grown for biofuels absorb CO2, burning them is zero sum.  Those crops are grown anyway, so this claim only works if you tear up concrete to grow the crops.

I had a long conversation with a person at the California Air Resources Board (CARB) regarding the required addition of ethanol to gasoline.  He fully agreed with me that substituting ethanol, or any other biofuel, for gasoline does absolutely nothing to reduce unnatural emissions of greenhouse gases and said that his agency was of the same mind.

Actually what I call for is efficiency and followed by solar and wind. So what are you actually arguing with? "Fevered Planet" was about the politics and economics, so it does not go into detail. But one of the things it focuses on is stuff in our economy that causes us to use resources wastefully. Why do I get the feeling you are commenting without having read the article?

"i can teach you no more technique. your level -- has surpassed mine."

"thank you, master. i will not disappoint you in the tournament."

"--but i forbid you to participate in any competition."

"i-- i don't understand!"

"because your understanding is weakest where it is most important."

"i have studied. i have trained. i have done as you asked, always."

"then tell me: why do you fight?"

Gar,

The essay that you cited WAS about replacing fossil fuels with non-fossil fuels.  "Fossil fuel use imposes all sorts of costs on others."  Etc.  And JMG, said, "[l]ast I checked, fossil fuels were the problem."  If you disagree with those positions, then we agree.  But then I question why you would mention or link to an essay with which you disagree.

Wolverine, I think people usually talk about eliminating fossil fuels because it's more descriptive, but the next step is to actually eliminate all fuels.  However, it's a bit of a conceptual leap to go from fossil fuels to fuels.

First, then you have to talk about eliminating nuclear fuel, which we would probably agree need to be eliminated, although that is certainly not a unanimous position (as I can tell you from extensive debates with pro-nukers, which this comment might set off).

Second, then you have to talk about no biofuels, another thing that sets people off, particularly since Real Soon Now there are going to be all kinds of cellulosic fuels (e.g., Kosla).

Third, then you have to explain all of this, so it's easier to just say "fossil fuels".  And right now, assuming deforestation accounts for 20% of GHGs, then the other 80% of GHGs are currently coming from fossil fuels -- so Actually Existing GHGs, at the moment, are mostly fossil fuels.

Gar --

And about the Z article, Gar, good on you for bringing up Zuboff's material, I always thought that she did some very important work there.  Although she backs off from the obvious implication of her work, which is that employee-operated-and-owned firms would be more efficient -- but you can still use her material to argue that position, it seems to me.

Read the whole thing!  Not bad.  

However, it'd be better when sharing about the story of the inequality of labor to expand that to how the degraded, devalued, worker finds self-esteem more on what they purchase than the work they do.  However, living in a gristwash world where being anti-consumption risks being the anti-christ for Pope's American Green Al Qaeda, I can see why you might have left that out.