Instead of resigning ourselves to a future with coal and the promise of dubious technologies, we should stand up and fight.  You cannot simultaneously tackle global warming and promote the continued use of dirty fossil fuels.  It is one or the other, and we need to stop buying the coal industry's line that they have a place in the fight to stop climate change.

The pursuit of CCS as a climate mitigation solution is unwise given the lack of technological maturity of CCS as well the absence of its commercial viability.  The construction of "capture ready" power plants puts hope in an end-of-pipe solution that may or may not be realized in time to effectively address power sector CO2 emissions.  A tremendous amount of uncertainty persists around CCS, including whether or not CO2 can in fact be permanently stored in an environmentally sound manner.  What's more, CCS addresses only one of the myriad environmental externalities associated with coal.  Even if CCS could deliver on CO2, it would still fail to solve the other problems inherent with the combustion of dirty fuels.  

CCS should be scrapped, along with CTL, and all the money blowing about Capitol Hill looking for a version of our energy future to invest in, should be put towards renewables and efficiency.  These solutions are real and available today to provide us with the energy secure, price stable, climate friendly future we all desire.

If anything in the coal industry needs more research, and actual implementation it's IGCC. I have serious reservations about building dozens of massive new coal plants, but IGCC does make sense for replacing older, much dirter, and polluting coal plants.

I don't know if carbon sequestration will ever work. But I do know that sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and mercury produced from older coal plants are still having a significant impact on our environment -- right now. Old school pollutants like these aren't as sexy as global warming, but they are having a far greater impact on our environment then global warming will have in the foreseeable future.

An important point made at the hearing is coal to liquid will screw up the entire coal market (to say nothing of then environmental impact from dramatically increased coal mining, processing residue and the conversion problem). Coal prices in a large part are depressed by the limited use of coal for energy.

Right now, coal use is largely limited to a limited number a power and industrial plants. Start turning coal into auto fuel and demand will expand explosively if it's competitive to gasoline in price. There simply is a limited number of coal mines in our country, and limits to how fast we can get it out of our ground.

Not to mention we only have a limited amount of accessable coal in the ground, that it affordable to mine and in places where we feel it's appropiate to blow up the mountains and remove the coal. Burn that coal in our 1986 Plymouth Sundances and 2009 volkwagon Toureugs, and there won't be the coal there to keep the lights on -- or it will cause massive inflation on electric prices.

If anything our priorities in our country when it comes to energy we should be:

Looking towards diversifying our energy profile, particularly by adding more renewable sources.
Ensuring fair pricing of existing energy sources, especially as certain fuel sources start to run up against their limits on consumption.
Assist communities in building compact, pleasant, sustainable, and livable communities.
Replacing old coal plants with newer coal plants that consume less coal, produce much lower toxic emissions, and less carbon dioxide.
Reject attempts to defile scared lands and places simply to reduce the cost of energy in short-time.
Improve efficency in all ways possible in our society.

Has anyone tried to calculate what might be accomplished if the proposed CCS/CTL subsidies were instead used for developing solar/wind/cogen?  

This is an extremely complex subject and so there are probably no easy solutions.  Can energy sources be divided into parts?  Of course, there is "clean" and "dirty" energy, but in addition there is "electrical" and "mechanical" both of which can be sub-divided into "source" and "use" either or both of which can be "clean" or "dirty."  So it is not an easy choice - you can install solar panels on your house to give you clean energy but are those panels produced by clean manufacturers and does your use of them ensure their clean purpose?

Oil is now getting to be in short supply although their are still many potential sources (sub North Pole?) around.  And auto manufacturers prefer the internal combustion engine.  Coal is available for the next 1,000 plus years, although we no longer see coal-fired steam engines tootling over the rails hauling coal from mines all over North America.  Diesel (oil) transportation is preferred.  Electricity, the cleanest energy, is produced by coal (or natural gas) the dirtiest source.

Unless we are prepared to see and endure the complete upset of our current capitalistic system of rick and reward where the risk has been transferred to the customer (Mattel) and the reward maintained for the corporation, we are all at risk from global events, like volatility in temperature norms.

If we are producing too much carbon dioxide the most obvious, simple solution is breaking that gas into its two components, the solid carbon and the gas oxygen, sequestering the solid and releasing the oxygen back into the atmosphere.  But you'll have to figure out a way to make a profit from that process before it will even be considered.

Growing up in rural WV I have seen just how clean strip mining is and mountaintop removal is about the worst thing I can think of it is destroying vast swaths of once beautiful forested land as well as peoples lives and livelyhoods. It makes me sick at heart. For the FOOLs in Washington don't give a damn that the Billions in give aways to the oil coal energy corps, we could make low cost loans to put solar wind hybrid systems on just about every home and wind turbines on quite a few mountains.
I know of places where the wind is pretty much 24/7, battery back up power storage at homes and business could handle a lot of the power needed on still or cloudy days and nights.
This mountian destruction is also going to affect the aquafers since they are using so much dynamite it will eventually crack them open and ruin the riverheads.