The "We got it, so let's use it" argument is a bad one, especially when it comes to coal - and nuclear weapons.

“Advisory panel calls for a $1.2 trillion investment in carbon capture and storage”

Remember “There’s No Such Thing as Clean Coal“?  The new “conventional wisdom” is the opposite:  Let’s fool the public into thinking there is such a thing as clean coal, and make billions and billions of dollars from it. How?  We’ll just tell them we have to use it. We’ll say we can “capture” all the CO2. Why do we have to use it?  Because there’s so much of it.

I’m very grateful this argument does not apply to the thousands of nuclear warheads the U.S. has bought and paid for.

The mere fact that something is plentiful and cheap and therefore we have to use all of it is an argument that shouldn’t apply to any fossil fuel.  In the first place, we don’t have to use fossil fuels anymore because we know what kind of energy is renewable, we know how to get it and how to use it.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t matter to the pollution profiteers what the truth is, as long as they’re raking in the dough. It doesn’t matter how many people eventually die from climate change to the pollution profiteers.

In fact, in order to prevent catastrophic climate change, we should stop using coal right now.   If carbon capture and storage is ever to be used, it won’t be for 10-20 or maybe even 30 years.  It might work only partially.  If so, it’s mostly useless.  No one knows to which degree it will work, yet even people who know better are insisting we have to try and therefore depend on CCS.  And they are willing to gamble $1.2 trillion on it.  It would make a lot more sense not to put that CO2 up into the atmosphere to begin with.

Advocates of this eternal use of every last bit of coal are some of the same people who think health care for everyone is too expensive, or that developing solar power all over the U.S.  is too ambitious.  But it’s not too ambitious to them to sink  $1.2 trillion into development of  something that might not work at all.

Wouldn’t that kind of money buy a lot of solar panels?

An emphasis on clean renewable energy is no longer something people seem terribly excited about.     Health care and other issues have long ago trumped concern about climate change.  It’s now generally accepted in Washington that the cap and trade bill won’t pass our Congress next year,  or possibly ever.   Lawmakers (lawyers) are now actually flirting with a carbon tax, which would be an enormous improvement to the cap and trade idea.  The bad news is, Republican Lindsey Graham is the one now writing the most eagerly anticipated bill, (see below)  despite the fact that we already have several better climate bills that have received very little attention.

Graham’s will [...]