Is “we’re going to burn the coal anyway” an argument for carbon sequestration?
I’m involved in an ongoing email debate over the wisdom of “clean coal”—that is, coal power plants that capture and sequester their carbon dioxide emissions. It will eventually be published on a State Dept. website, and then in Grist. In the meantime, a preview of sorts. A frequent argument one hears in favor of a heavy focus on carbon sequestration goes like this: fossil fuels are fantastic energy carriers, dense, portable, and cheap. People will burn them up no matter what. So we might as well figure out a way to make them low-carbon by sequestering their emissions. It’s a way to buy time as we figure out other clean energy options. It’s a seductive argument. It sounds easier to convince people to clean up what they’re already doing than to persuade them to do something entirely different. But I don’t think it holds up under scrutiny. It trades on the implicit notion that sequestering CO2 is just a matter of tweaking our current power system a bit—a quick, low-cost twist on business-
