Coal Shower

This item in today's Christian Science Monitor is as sobering a story as you're likely to read about the big picture on carbon emissions. What reporter Mark Clayton found is that:

• In the last five years, coal-fired power plants have been coming "online at a rate of better than two per week."
• The trend is accelerating, not slowing.
• While China, which has led the global coal boom, appears set to slow its expansion by 50 percent, the United States, India, and to a lesser extent, even some Kyoto signatories are ramping theirs up. Way up.

Clayton reports that the resulting emissions from the global coal binge will be greater than is currently projected under most climate models' business-as-usual assumptions.

The startling figures give greater urgency to the deployment of carbon sequestration technology that would capture emissions at the power plant, then pump them deep underground. Experts stress, however, that China and India are unlikely to sequester carbon emissions until the US does.

Alas, according to Dept. of Energy figures, the US is now planning to build more than 150 coal-fired power plants that do not capture or sequester emissions.