Word: coal
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Environmentalists have long known that when it comes to climate change, coal will be a dealbreaker. The carbon-intensive fossil fuel provides nearly half of the United States' electricity, and is responsible for some 30% of the country's greenhouse gas emissions. That's just due to the coal plants already operating - as the U.S. looks to expand its energy supply to meet rising demand in the future, over 100 coal plants are in various stages of development around the country. If those plants are built without the means to capture and sequester underground the carbon they emit...
...remove it at the back end. The process also leaves a huge carbon footprint, says Rose George, author of The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why it Matters. In the UK, she says, "the sewage system uses as much energy as what the largest coal fire station in the [country] produces" - about 28.8 million tones of carbon dioxide a year...
...coal industry counters that the sheer rise in demand for electricity--projected to increase 30% by 2030, according to the federal Energy Information Agency--means a new generation of coal plants is inevitable. Dominion executives point out that Virginia has a projected shortfall in electricity supply and that the Wise County plant is needed to close that...
...Coal remains cheap and plentiful in the U.S. (as long as no price is put on carbon emissions), and its supporters argue that "clean coal" will solve the pollution problem. But it's not clear what they mean. "Clean coal" can refer to new technologies that remove pollutants like soot and sulfur dioxide from the waste process, or it can mean capturing and sequestering the carbon burned in coal. The former exists--the Dominion plant is a good example--but the latter does not. And a new report by the International Energy Agency noted that research for sequestration projects remains...
...many green activists, climate change is fundamentally a moral issue. To accept a new generation of polluting coal plants is to doom future generations to an impoverished planet. So the response should be fundamentally moral as well, using the same tactics--civil disobedience, nonviolent protest--as those of the civil rights movement...