Wow, can we call this a moratorium?

That's not a win -- that's a big loss!

The worst offenders in CO2 are the oldest, most inefficient plants!

Closing those is more important than preventing new plants from coming online.

In fact, if the environmentalists had let coal plants be built since 1970, we could have obsolesced the more egregious ones, and met Kyoto ten times over.

Perhaps this will inspire the Chinese.  Oh wait, nevermind...

Especially when it comes to non-CO2 emissions (ones regulated under the Clean Air Act), older plants are much worse polluters than newer plants.

In the words of a recent wall street journal editorial on the financial crisis...Don't just do something, stand there.

Hoorah for CLEAN energy technologies! The idea of clean coal is a joke - impossible to accomplish without massive federal funding that would make even nuke plants look cheap. There's a good discussion of alt fuels at AltFuels101.com.

Look Brazelton,

I'm sick and tired of you Grist Ecologist whipping out some list of myths or ways to answer the (insert nasty term here) just because someone presents a reasonable answer that doesn't require mouthing the Green Party Line Bullshit.

The old coal plants are dirty.

If we had built new ones we'd be better off by any metric you clowns could muster.

Should we replace them ultimately?  Yes, but we could have been breathing easier, with less CO2 RIGHT NOW, if the greens hadn't dragged us all down with their crazy meddling.

...just replace both with renewables.  That way there is no "marginally better".

There's only absolutely better!

The governments worker bees do care and do understand.   This is a great example of how they respond when the freaken idiots that have been controlling the govenment for the last eight years are bagged and dumped.   Let us all hope the freaks put Palin up again.   It's the best thing they have done for us and the environment in years.

The problem with this attitude toward anything that needs serious change is that it does not produce significant change.  Mining coal, in the first place, is reason alone to ban new coal plants.  Building more of them will simply result in more environmental and ecological destruction by mining, including some of the worst environmental destruction on Earth called mountain top mining.  The only way to stop this hideous practice is to stop building coal plants, not to focus on which ones emit how much pollution or use how much coal.  Those are minor details in comparison.

First, we certainly cannot build any new coal plants.  Second, many if not all of the existing coal plants could be upgraded using the Organic Rankine Cycle to get more power and not burn any more coal.  This would be a temporary while new technologies are developed.  We certainly need more conservation.  I do not know what technologies will eventually win out, but the whole world is working on clean energy.  We really need to avoid any bad big decisions, and building 100 new coal plants is a bad big decision.  I think eventually wind and enhanced geothermal will be huge.   Also microgeneration using hydrogen fuel cells in the home.  The hydrogen of course needs to be produced cleanly, which could be done with electrolysis, but a cheaper method may have to be devised.  The organic rankine cycle can also be used at many idustrial sites to recover energy from waste heat.

Any carbon diet strategy would be dependent upon clean coal:

"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."