He also said, "Near-term demands for energy can be satisfied via a real emphasis on energy efficiency and renewable energies."
Your public statements recognize the climate problem and indicate a desire to do what is right for the environment, the young generation, and your rate-payers. However, your suggestion that new, more efficient coal-fired power plants, which do not capture CO2, can be part of a solution ignores the basic facts and urgency of terminating coal emissions. Dirty, inefficient coal plants must be replaced to avoid climate disasters, but only by choosing options from energy efficiency, renewable energies, nuclear power, and coal plants that capture all emissions, including CO2.
Near-term demands for energy can be satisfied via a real emphasis on energy efficiency and renewable energies. Neither carbon sequestration nor nuclear power can help in the near-term, and they both have serious issues even over the longer term. But Massachusetts and California have demonstrated the tremendous potential of efficiency aided by appropriate incentives.
Plans for over 50 coal-fired power plants nationwide have been dropped in recent months due to rising construction and coal prices, unpredictable carbon costs, and concerns about climate change. Near-term energy needs can be met with massive but feasible conservation and efficiency programs, cogeneration, solar, wind, and biomass generation. Diversifying generation has other benefits -- creating jobs, conserving water, and minimizing the possibility of terrorist acts against the grid, about which former CIA Director James Woolsey recently warned the National Governors' Association.
Recently I testified as climate expert in suits filed by the automobile manufacturers against vehicle greenhouse gas regulations in California and Vermont. The manufacturers lost both cases, and they are going to be scrambling to improve vehicle efficiency. As you know, another suit has been filed, on behalf of the Inuit of Kivalina, against ExxonMobil, Duke Energy, and others who bear special responsibility for the emissions that drive climate change.
http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/4/1/16055/76057
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