Global Warming / Climate Instability
in the Mountain State
Sen. Rockefeller Sticking His Head in Clean Coal Sand

The Charleston Gazette ran this op-ed by OVEC organizer Robin Blakeman on Sept. 17, 2010.

Despite what he said at a Sept. 8 forum at the University of Charleston, Sen. Rockefeller hasnt really embraced the reality of global climate change, nor the role that emissions from coal-fired power plants play in that process. His comments regarding carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) show that he is still very conflicted on the issue.

Sen. Rockefeller told the audience that global climate change is a reality and those who say otherwise are sticking their heads in the sand. But he also stuck his own head in some "clean" coal sand when he said there is no need to put a price on carbon emissions which arise from coal production until the elusive CCS methods are available.

Scientists tell us climate change catastrophes are already occurring and likely to increase and we need to take action now. But the technology and infrastructure necessary for large-scale carbon capture and sequestration is far from being fully developed. It will be decades at best before this technology and infrastructure could be put into place and it is prohibitively costly to develop it.

Even if and thats a big "if" CCS systems could be developed more quickly and financed by private corporations, the use of such systems would result in an increasing demand for a dwindling resource. Increased demand for coal mining means increased stress on already critically stressed environments. Coal mining is never clean!

As author Jeff Biggers recently stated in regard to the CCS debate, "Increased coal production will sentence our impoverished and besieged coal communities to another generation of despair, illness, coal slurry, coal ash, residential displacement, blocked economic diversification, black lung We need to phase out coal-fired plants, like the coal ash-spewing-into-the-river dinosaur in Meredosia, Ill., not give out a billion in welfare to reckless utility companies "

There are far too many unanswered questions: Where will all the carbon dioxide be injected underground? Will there be a massive system of pipelines crisscrossing the country to transport it?

What happens when inevitably the (theoretically) stored carbon dioxide spills or leaches out into our water tables? Or when it "burps" out into the atmosphere.

CCS will be the biggest boondoggle our country has seen for a long time. Our energy dollars would be better spent moving forward with renewable technologies that will serve us well in the future, rather than on dubious projects that will tie us to the past.