Click on the headline (link) for the full text.
Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage
NYT: Is America Ready to Quit Coal?
Melanie Warner, New York Times
… The coal industry, which powered the industrial revolution and supplied America with much of its electricity for more than 60 years, is in a fight for its survival.
With concerns over climate change intensifying, electricity generation from coal, once reliably cheap, looks increasingly expensive in the face of the all-but-certain prospect of regulations that would impose significant costs on companies that emit large amounts of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.
As a result, utilities’ plans for new coal plants are being turned down left and right. In the last two-and-a-half years, plans for 83 plants in the United States have either been voluntarily withdrawn or denied permits by state regulators. The roughly 600 coal-fired power plants in the United States are responsible for almost one-third of the country’s total carbon emissions, but they are distinctly at odds with a growing outlook that embraces clean energy.
A new campaign against coal by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a prominent environmentalist, and the Waterkeeper Alliance is called “The Dirty Lie.” Other clean-energy advocates are equally passionate.
(14 February 2009)
James Hansen: Coal-fired power stations are death factories. Close them
James Hansen, The Observer
The government is expected to give the go-ahead to the coal-burning Kingsnorth power plant. Here, one of the world’s foremost climate experts launches an excoriating attack on Britain’s long love affair with the most polluting fossil fuel of all
(15 February 2009)
Are we approaching peak coal? (#2)
Joseph Romm, Gristmill
Coal may not be as abundant as widely believe; ‘clean coal’ effort may be fruitless
—
Part 1 noted that the U.S. Geological Survey’s stunning December report found:
The coal reserves estimate for the Gillette coalfield is 10.1 billion short tons of coal (6 percent of the original resource total).
Although the report didn’t get much media attention, it was a shocker because the Gillette field, within Wyoming’s Powder River Basin “is the most prolific coalfield in the United States” and in 2006 provided “over 37 percent of the Nation’s total yearly production.”
Now Clean Energy Action has issued a new report, Coal: Cheap and Abundant … Or is it? that goes beyond the analysis in the USGS study and concludes:
It appears that rather than having a “200 year supply of coal,” the United States has a much shorter planning horizon for moving beyond coalfired power plants. Depending on the resolution of geologic, economic, legal and transportation constraints facing future coal mine expansion, the planning horizon for moving beyond coal could be as short as 20-30 years.
(12 February 2009)
