Friday, January 30, 2009

Coal-to-Liquid Loans in the Stimulus

The Vine, an environmental blog at The New Republic, has a piece up attacking provisions for coal-to-liquid plant loan guarantees in the stimulus. They call it "The Senate's Insane Coal Idea." Their argument is that coal-to-liquid plants are big polluters, and that liquified coal produces more emissions than gasoline. I find their objections silly, and another example of why we shouldn't listen to environmentalists when making any sort of serious decisions.

I oppose the stimulus outright, but if we must have it, this provision isn't any worse than most of the garbage contained within it. The Vine article acts like we are just going to start pumping out liquid coal and be burning it like crazy. We aren't. We need alternatives to oil, and this is a possible alternative. Who cares if it is too dirty at the present time. If we don't develop it, we'll never find out if it can be made into a cleaner technology. Dismissing technologies out of hand because of prejudice based on current conditions is what's insane.

3 comments:

  1. The problem is that most climate scientists will tell you that if the world doesn't act to sharply curb emissions in the next 10-20 years, it'll be too late. Allocating money to a technology that can't be projected to bring down emissions in that time frame is equivalent to allocating money to drowning coastal cities.

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  2. "The problem is that most climate scientists will tell you that if the world doesn't act to sharply curb emissions in the next 10-20 years, it'll be too late."

    If that timeframe is correct, then we might as well not even worry about it. Barring a spectacular breakthrough, there's no way there will be anywhere near that kind of massive reduction in emissions within the next 10 years, and probably not in 20. It's likely emissions will continue to increase, not decrease.

    "Allocating money to a technology that can't be projected to bring down emissions in that time frame is equivalent to allocating money to drowning coastal cities."

    That objection makes no sense unless the technology were actually massively deployed. Researching a technology has nothing to do with the effect of climate change on cities.

    And there are no existing technologies that could be widely deployed, that are going to bring down emissions within that timeframe. There's nothing wrong with working on any and all alternative energy sources, regardless of what they look like right at this moment. We aren't going to get anywhere if we block development. And having anything that can replace or supplement oil will be useful, for economic and strategic reasons. If we don't, we'll still be dependent on oil 20 years from now.

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  3. Barring a spectacular breakthrough, there's no way there will be anywhere near that kind of massive reduction in emissions within the next 10 years, and probably not in 20.

    Why not? The US could cut its emissions by half just by switching its transportation priorities and economic regulations to what is common in Europe. If it made more effort and emulated Switzerland, it could cut its emissions by a factor of 4. And that's without much new technology or heavy regulations. (The Japanese tried that, and their CO2 emissions are still terrible.)

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