I’m in favor of reducing the use of coal to generate electricity, provided we do something about the hardship it will cause in West Virginia, the Navajo reservation and other places, but not to reduce CO2 emissions.
How long do we have to go without the temperature measurements showing any increase before you stop beating the man-made global warming drum and realize the hockey stick is broken? We’ve had 14 or 15 years, depending on when you start your year. It’s reasonably clear that the measured warming between World War II and the late ’90s was because more and more concrete was poured at the airports where weather stations tend to be, increasing the heat island effect. We quit expanding airports around the turn of the century, and the temperature increase stopped.
The global warming disaster scenarios are based on model predictions – unvalidated model predictions! Validated means you predict something, make measurements, and see if the predictions agree with the measurements. They don’t! There are no validated global warming models.
It isn’t rocket science. I know. I was a rocket scientist!
Other things being equal (they never are), burning coal in power plants produces about twice as much CO2 per unit energy as burning natural gas. That’s straightforward chemistry.
There are essentially two ways to reduce CO2 emissions: Make the process more efficient, or extract the CO2 from the exhausts. It’s hard to argue against more efficiency, but we’ve gone about as far as we can go. Requiring coal plants to have CO2 emissions close to those of natural gas power plants requires them to extract the CO2 from the exhausts. The technology exists to do this, but it’s much more expensive.
If we want to get rid of coal plants, fine, but don’t use global warming as an excuse. And keep in mind that the same people who oppose the use of coal also don’t like fracking, which gives us the natural gas to replace the coal. They also don’t like nuclear power. When the constraints overlap, we are left with no place to live!
Jerry L. Modisette
Pagosa Springs
