Coal-Fired Apocalypse

I don't know what to add to this McClatchey report about the resurgence of coal in America, so I will just highlight a couple quotes and leave it at that for now. Read it and weep. Then dry your eyes and resolve to vote for change.

[U.S.] Utilities are proposing to build 154 coal-fired power plants in the next 25 years, according to "Coal's Resurgence in Electric Power Generation," a recent Department of Energy report.

Most of those new plants would use conventional coal-burning technology, which would increase carbon dioxide emissions from U.S. coal plants by more than 50 percent by 2030, according to the Energy Information Administration, the analytic division of the Energy Department. A traditional coal plant produces three to four times more CO2 - a potent "greenhouse gas" that traps the sun's heat and helps raise the Earth's temperature - than comes from a modern plant that uses natural gas as its fuel.

...

"It's always cheaper to emit CO2 to the atmosphere than to capture and store it," said Howard Herzog, an energy researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. "With no carbon policy in place to control CO2 emissions, there is no incentive to consider carbon capture and storage technology."

...

"We are living in two parallel worlds: a world of potentially what we should be doing about climate change and energy security, and the real world of what we are doing," said Martin Hoffert, an emeritus professor of physics at New York University.