I live by the coal producing area of Yorkshire in the UK. We are told that the clouds from the cooling towers of the multiple power stations are clean water vapour. This is what causes the dark clouds and black scaring on the downwind side of these towers!
If available technology was used to clean and scrub this smoke, coal could be used in the short term. Technology costs money which ultimately means consumers pay - as always. Governments are too frightened of alienating voters to risk enforcing existing pollution control legislation. In the UK we have a lobby against wind turbines - unbelievable. I wonder how many generations it will take to change all attitudes.
My signature is - Save Energy Today. Tomorrow May be Too Late.

Thought some of you might be interested in this map of US coal problems:
http://projects.publicintegrity.org/coalash/
I remember how on a recent stay in St. Just (Land's End) the coal in the air caught at my throat, just after I had waited in line behind a woman buying coal to burn. It seems to me in addition to vested interests, it's about poverty, as noone would burn coal this way if they could afford another. That's why we need a global effort to utilize clean energy and provide it to all. Whatever the cost, it will be miniscule compared to the cost of any other scenario.

Coal is a chemically complex fuel. Whenever it is burned, gases are given off and particles of ash, called "fly ash," are released. The sulfur in coal combines with oxygen to form sulfur dioxide, which can be a major source of air pollution if emitted in large enough quantities.
the burning of coal can affect our ecosystem and increase the global warming.If we to live in a clean and healthy climate we have invent new source of energy like biofuels, low carbon fuel and solar energy which will replace the coal use.

carefornature
www.justmeans.com

The end of coal is here in more ways than one my friend. Please take a look at Dave Rutledge of Cal Tech's slide presentation. The rest of the information I've included was part of a deputation I made on Canada's Parliament Hill to a Parliamentary committee investigating fossilf fuel depletion.

My thinking is that it is unlikely that we are going to truly do everything that we can to get off of fossil fuels until it is made clear to everyone just how essential it is to our economic well being that we do so. Fortunately, from a climate change and environmental perspective, mother nature has seen fit to severly limit just how much of this stuff we will be able to access. The next century will see the end of N.A.'s massive consumption of oil, gas, and coal even if we pump it out of the ground as fast as humanly possible. It is therefore incumbent on us from an economic standpoint to make alternate arrangements as soon as we possibly can if we hope not to suffer an economic collapse that makes the current one look like the good old days.

Ton confrere,

Jeff Berg
www.postcarbontoronto.org

Handy Energy Facts

MMb/d = Million barrels per day.

= equivalent

Liquid fuel = Crude oil + Oil

Tcf = Trillion cubic feet

95% of all transportation is liquid fuel dependent.

------------------------------------------------------------------

"Reserves should be an indication of future production. Unfortunately it seems to be the other way around." ~ Dave Rutledge, Chair Cal-Tech Science and Engineering. http://rutledge.caltech.edu/

In this slide deck Dr. Rutledge proves categorically that the past is a better indicator of the future than the hypothetical when it comes to oil supply.

"Reserves are not the problem, delivery is." ~ Dave Hughes, NRCan, Canadian Geological Survey.

http://www.archive.org/details/David_Hughes_North_Vancouver_November_06

In this slide deck David Hughes, geologist 35 years at NRCan, shows what the data tells about the future supply of hydrocarbons.

Canada imports about 1 million barrels of oil a day from Iraq, Saudi Arabia and other far away places. As a result Canada is far more vulnerable to oil shocks in the rest of the world than it needs to be.

Canada's Oil Exports: (NEB)

Canada is today averaging 1.7 MMb/d. of oil exports per day to the U.S.

http://www.neb.gc.ca/clf-nsi/rnrgynfmtn/sttstc/crdlndptrlmprdct/2007/ttlcrdlxprtmprl.xls

Canada's oil production in 2006 averaged 2.62 MMb/d.

http://www.neb.gc.ca/clf-nsi/rnrgynfmtn/sttstc/crdlndptrlmprdct/stmtdprdctn-eng.html

65% of Canada's oil exported from us to U.S.

Quebec and the Maritimes rely on the international oil market for 90% of their oil requirements. Ontario gets about a third of its oil internationally.

Ontario's supply security is further complicated by the fact that 2/3 of its supply while technically Canadian in origin is first sent south from Alberta to the U.S. This presents no problem while contracts and agreements are being respected, but as we have found with lumber and beef when times are turbulent what's sauce for the goose may not always prove to be sauce for the gander.

The Canadian NEB on Canada's Natural Gas Exports.

http://www.neb.gc.ca/clf-nsi/rnrgynfmtn/sttstc/ntrlgsxprt/ntrlgsxprtsttstc/ntrlgsmprtsmmry-eng.html#a_s_01

Canada exported 3.5 Tcf of natural gas in 2006, and 3.6 Tcf in 2005 to the U.S. This represented about 56% of our total extraction for those years. We consumed 3 Tcf ‘in-house’ in 2006. According to the NEB's projections Canadian demand is expected to rise.

The NEB's latest report indicates that Canada's indigenous natural gas supply will decline by 7% to 15% through 2008 - 2009.

http://www.neb.gc.ca/clf-nsi/rnrgynfmtn/nrgyrprt/ntrlgs/ntrlgsdlvrblty20072009/ntrlgsdlvrblty20072009-eng.pdf

Simple arithmetic shows that 3.5 + 3 = 6.5.

As our extraction rate is expected to slow to between 6 Tcf and 5.5 Tcf; something obviously has to give. Will it be Canadian access, U.S. access or both? And which consumers and businesses will be forced to do without?

This scenario also brings to light the relevant NAFTA clauses agreed to by the Mulroney government.

The energy relevant article of NAFTA is found in Chapter 6; Article 605. Aka. The "Proportionality Clause".

This clause states that neither party is allowed by government decree to reduce the flow of oil and/or natural gas to the other partner, “even in times of scarcity”, to a rate that is less than the average rate that was exported over the last 36 months.

For U.S. energy security this would appear to be a Santa clause. Canadians on the other hand may not be feeling quite so cheery about this arrangement, perhaps most especially at Christmas time given our climate.

http://www.dfait-maeci.gc.ca/nafta-ALENA/chap06-en.asp

Mexico by contrast said "Thanks but no thanks" to the proportionality clause.

How the U.S. deals with the COG it has for its industrial wheels. (Coal, Oil, Gas)

The U.S. exports an insignificantly small amount of coal, oil, gas and uranium.

The U.S. liquid fuel consumption is on average about 20 MMb/d

The U.S. produces on average about 5 MMb/d worth of crude oil.

The U.S. imports almost twice as much liquid fuel as China consumes in total: 12 MMb/d.

The U.S. consumes 20% of the world's coal production: 1,125 Million Tons last year.

The U.S. extracted 1,131 Mt of coal last year.

Therefore the U.S. consumed 99.45% of their indigenous coal production.

In every other case it consumed more fossil fuel energy than it extracted.

The U.S. extracted just over 20 Trillion cubic feet of natural gas per year.

The U.S. consumes just over 23 Trillion cubic feet of natural gas per year.

The U.S. imports 15% of this supply from Canada: 56% of our production.

The U.S. has 104 of the world's 439 nuclear reactors.

Saskatchewan has much of the last of the world's uranium rich veins.

According to Michael Ditmar, an energy analyst for CERN and ETH Zurich, the paucity of uranium rich veins to bleed into the reactors of tomorrow makes it impossible, from a mining engineering and economic standpoint, for the world to increase its current rate of uranium powered electricity. This technical analysis is available from ASPO on DVD. http://www.aspo-ireland.org/index.cfm/page/shop

U.S. oil and natural gas reserves are both less than 5% of the world's reserves.

The U.S. today consumes close to 25% of the world's production of these finite, climate dangerous, energy dense molecules. A disparity well worth considering.

Jeff Berg
www.postcarbontoronto.org

Hey everyone--

I just got this letter below from Bill McKibben--and today he's helping to create the largest ever civil-disobedience on climate change in history. He's in DC with thousands, protesting the coal-fired Capitol Power plant--a dirty symbol of our dirty energy history.

He's asking for our help by signing onto a statement of support--can you add your name by following this link? I just signed it, and think we all need to stand together on this one.

http://www.350.org/coal-free

Thanks everybody!

--------------------------------------

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Bill McKibben, 350.org
Subject: Stand with me to take down dirty coal.

Dear Friends,

There are moments in a nation's--and a planet's--history when it may be necessary for some to break the law in order to bear witness to an evil, bring it to wider attention, and push for its correction.

Today is one of those days.

In a few hours, the first big protest of the Obama era -- and the largest-ever civil disobedience against global warming in this country -- will take place against the not-very-scenic backdrop of the coal-fired Capitol Hill Power Plant in Washington DC.

Myself and thousands of people of every stripe will be risking arrest today, and I'm asking you to stand with me as it unfolds.

Please stand behind the thousands gathering today in DC, and show the world that people everywhere are uniting behind a future free of coal--a future safe from the ravages of climate change.

Click here to stand in solidarity with this action: http://www.350.org/Coal-Free/

Here's the statement you'll be signing onto:

I share your vision of a coal-free future, and stand in solidarity with the coalition of citizens united not only to get DC off of coal, but for a clean energy future and a safe-climate for the entire planet.

With President Obama and a new US Congress, there is more possibility for climate action than ever before. It really feels like the U.S. is close to a breakthrough--and this protest can help create the political space a breakthrough requires.

Here's the backstory: Washington DC has seen its share of big protests over the years, and most of them center on the White House, the Mall or the Capitol.

But today's event is just a few blocks a way from the White House at the the Capitol Power Plant--a dirty symbol of the dirtiest business on Earth, the combustion of coal.

In that one plant -- owned and operated by our senators and representatives -- you can see all the filth that comes with coal. There are the particulates it spews into the air and hence the lungs of those Washington residents who enjoy breathing. There are the profits it hands to the coal industry, which is literally willing to level mountains across West Virginia and Kentucky to increase its fat margins. And most of all there is the invisible carbon dioxide it spews each day into the atmosphere, drying our forests, melting our glaciers and acidifying our oceans.

The power plant is only a symbol, of course -- a lunch counter or a bus station in the fight for environmental justice. We'll sit down at its gates for a single afternoon, but the message is much larger: it's time to start figuring out how to shut down every coal-fired plant on the planet. Success won't come right away because we're up against some of the world's richest corporations, but we have to start turning this tanker around someday, and tomorrow is that day.

Again, our efforts will be greatly helped if you stand in solidarity with this action: http://www.350.org/Coal-Free/

This may seem like an odd time to take to the streets -- after all, the new administration has done more in a month to fight global warming than all the presidents of the past 20 years. But in fact, it's the perfect moment. For one thing, our leaders may actually listen -- in the anti-science years of the Bush administration, global warming activists concentrated their work on state capitols, knowing that the federal government would never budge. Now, if we demonstrate that there's real public pressure, we may give the Democratic Congress and the White House some room to act.

More to the point, the time not to act is running out. Climate science has grown steadily darker in the past 18 months, ever since the rapid melt of Arctic sea ice in the summer of 2007 showed scientists that change was coming faster than they'd reckoned.

That message was underlined recently at the Washington meetings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, when Stanford researcher Christopher Field said: "We are basically looking now at a future climate that's beyond anything we've considered seriously in climate model simulations." Our foremost climatologist, NASA's James Hansen, has given that future a number -- any level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere beyond 350 parts per million, his team has demonstrated, is "incompatible with the planet on which civilization developed."

Since we're already past that number -- the carbon dioxide level is at 387 parts per million -- the fight is on. Indeed, by Hansen's calculation, the world will need to be out of the coal-burning business by 2030, and the West much sooner than that, if we're ever going to get back to 350. It's no accident that NASA's James Hansen announced he'll be on hand to get arrested. So will Gus Speth, who ran the United Nations Development Programme, and the farmer and author Wendell Berry who has seen the devastation of his native Kentucky.

And maybe most heartening, I'll be joined by over a thousand college students who will have just come from lobbying in the halls of Congress for clean energy. They'll have just wrapped up PowerShift '09--an climate convergence organized by a separate coaltion that promises to be a historic catalyst in this movement. It's a perfect healthy movement is like a healthy ecosystem--marked by spectacular diversity. There are many ways to be a climate activist--lobby, rally, or for me today, risking arrest with civil disobedience.

Getting the planet off coal -- getting the planet back to 350 -- will be the main political and economic challenge for the lifetimes of those college students. Those of us who are older won't live long enough to see the final victory, but we can help get it started, by lobbying, by writing e-mails -- and by sitting down in the street on an afternoon in March.

Please join me,

Bill McKibben

P.S. Please forward this message far and wide. If your friends and family share a vision for coal-free, clean energy future safe from climate change--and I'm quite sure at least some of them do--ask them to sign our solidarity statement by clicking here: http://www.350.org/coal-free/

It may be worth looking at a documentary called The Future Makers which looks at Australia led renewable energy solutions. We focus so much on the problems that people are getting turned off- we need to show them the solutions and how easy it is to implement them. This film can be used as a tool in educating people and helping to push the debate the way it needs to go.
You can is a trailer of the film on change2.net
and read about it on
www.thefuturemakers.com.au
good luck

Glen-

Local environmentalists here in the Mojave Desert are suing to stop construction of solar thermal plants on relatively trivial grounds. The first major plant location at Ivanpah is pretty barren, but they're claiming it's pristine and lush. I suspect that they are being manipulated and probably paid by the coal industry. It's getting pretty weird.

If these small grassroots organizations succeed, it will put a crimp on the utility scale solar power industry, paving the way for all kinds of coal plants here in the west.

If you want to help, you may want to think about writing a letter about what a huge error they are making. Your credibility is pretty high in my opinion.

Mike Roddy

done

we dont need to lways libreally harp on what is or s not "nonviolent"

paz

Much electricity is wasted on supercomputers for searches nad many other things., and reducing this would eliminate some need for more and more power plants, renewable or otherwise. Let the price and people will waste less, like happened in the last gasoline price runup.

I want to say - thank you for this!

I want to say - thank you for this