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from the my-solar-panels-are-covered-in-soot dept.
Ken_g6 writes:
Wired today reports on continued coal use around the world and efforts to promote carbon capture and storage (CCS).
Today coal produces more than 40 percent of the world's electricity, a foundation of modern life. And that percentage is going up: In the past decade, coal added more to the global energy supply than any other source. Nowhere is the pre-eminence of coal more apparent than in the planet's fastest-growing, most populous region: Asia, especially China.
Many energy and climate researchers believe that CCS is vital to avoiding a climate catastrophe. Because it could allow the globe to keep burning its most abundant fuel source while drastically reducing carbon dioxide and soot, it may be more important - though much less publicized - than any renewable-energy technology for decades to come. No less than Steven Chu, the Nobel-winning physicist who was US secretary of energy until last year, has declared CCS essential. "I don't see how we go forward without it," he says.
Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs projects that solar power will be cost-competitive with other electricity sources in the US by 2033. So will we build more coal plants or tear them down?
(Score: 2) by sjames on Thursday March 27 2014, @07:50PM
When someone speaks of alternative energy, we hear all about the various energy costs involved, such that one gets the impression we could freeze the whole planet to absolute zero just by using a solar calculator. With nuclear we hear all about how it produces waste that will apparently remain dangerous 50 years after the universe ends.
Yet for oil, nobody speaks of all the oil we burn drilling, refining, and shipping fossil fuels. For coal, it's just pump the pollution into big storage tanks (where it will never decay, not even in 10,000 years). And we don't talk at all about the towns that had to be abandoned and are now being consumed by massive underground coal fires.