Aboveground CO2 has already been inadvertently begun ...

I meant to say, aboveground CO2 storage has already been inadvertently begun.

The problems posed by the desires of private utilities and mining companies to make money by selling and burning as much coal (and uranium) as possible shows why things like energy infrastructure, from the mines to the plants, should be owned by the government, i.e., theoretically the people.  With no lobbyists urging them to promote more ecologically and environmentally destructive energy use, the people would be in a much better position to do things like put a complete moratorium on new coal plants and phase out the old ones, as suggested by James Hansen in a previous column.  The fact that privately owned coal companies and utilities are a major roadblock to doing this is reason enough for the government to condemn them and buy them through eminent domain.

And before all you right wing anti-government types start crying about why this is a bad idea, answer this:  In an society such as this one where elections are regularly held for public offices, the public has a chance to change things to its liking.  Corporations, which own the coal companies and private utilities, are pure tyrannies where the public has absolutely no say in what they do.

All enterprises that greatly effect the public and the Earth should be publicly owned.  Otherwise, we get the "coal problem."

Hansen actually considers himself a conservative, I believe, which is why in his post he made a passing reference to not setting up a big "bureaucracy", which is why he likes tax-and-dividend.  In fact, he's never called for any kind of government intervention, as far as I can tell.  if that sounds like cognitive dissonance to you, check out Ken Ward's latest post and the ensuing discussion of the term.

Wolverine says:
And before all you right wing anti-government types start crying about why this is a bad idea, answer this:  In an society such as this one where elections are regularly held for public offices, the public has a chance to change things to its liking.  Corporations, which own the coal companies and private utilities, are pure tyrannies where the public has absolutely no say in what they do.

I already know what their answer is, with regard to publicly traded companies: That "we the public" ARE these companies. ExxonMobil has had a propaganda campaign to that effect, in advertisements and columns by mercenaries like Ben Stein, for some time now.
Of course it's a let-them-eat-cake lie - just look at ExMob's long history of suppressing any sort of shareholder dissent. I'm not familiar with the state of things in the coal industry, but I'd be surprised if it was much different.

"Just buy stock, go to shareholder meetings and advocate your views"; yup, this is let-them-eat-cakeism just like "if you don't like the law, change it" or, most offensive of all, "if you don't like the system, vote".

All these good-civics lies amount in practice to allowing oneself to be distracted and go through ineffectual motions while the processes of totalitarian private expropriation and complete environmental destruction are carried through to the end. The fact is, the enemy knows the window is closing, the party is almost over, so they're rushing to "get in everything under the wire", to use this political window to seize and reorganize everything so they'll be in a position to physically enforce dominance when they can no longer rely on law and governments to do so.

If you doubt this, just consider what's being discussed here, the fundamental insanity of privatizing such core systems as food, energy, and water(look over at today's Grist news for a link to water privatization), things so critical socially and biologically. It is obvious on its face that such systems must, practically and morally, be managed for the public good (including with good environmental stewardship). So what can you say about a political structure which, for puely ideological reasons, wants to concentrate them in the hands of private sociopathy? ("Sociopath" is of course meant literally - they not only say "greed is good" and aggressively seek profit to the exclusion and contempt of all other values in practice, this is also, according to capitalist ideology and its concomitant laws, what it's supposed to do in theory. This is declared in principle the highest good. Now what would you say about an individual who lived his private life that way, proclaiming such a value? You'd call him a monster.)