'Cathedral Thinking'
Energy's Future: Until we solve climate change, says James E. Rogers, we need even the dirtiest fuel.
Every day, Americans plug their cell phones, iPods and laptops into the wall, unaware that most of their electricity comes from coal, the dirtiest form of energy production. Duke Energy, which operates 20 coal-fired power plants, is the third largest producer of carbon emissions in the United States. Yet Duke's chairman and CEO, James E. Rogers, is an ardent climate-change lobbyist, advocating for emission reductions, carbon trading and cleaner technologies. In the second installment of our series of conversations about the future of energy, NEWSWEEK's Fareed Zakaria spoke to Rogers about his seemingly awkward balancing act. Excerpts:
Zakaria: Coal is cheap and plentiful, but 40 percent of the CO2 emissions the United States produces come from coal. What should we do?
Rogers: The difficulty with using coal is that when you burn it, it produces significant emissions like sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, mercury and fine particulate, as well as CO2. One of our challenges is to find a way to use this plentiful resource we have and reduce the emissions. We have made significant progress on reduction of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, mercury and fine particulate over the past several decades. We need now to turn our attention to making significant reductions of CO2.
Environmental scientists say to me that coal is 80 percent of the climate-change problem. That is, if you can't solve coal, you're not going to get a handle on global warming. Is that right?
I would quarrel as to whether coal is 80 percent of the problem. It primarily plays a role in the 35 to 40 percent of the total U.S. emissions which come from power plants.
But if you count India and China, which get the vast majority of their electricity from coal, don't you get a different sense of the scale of this problem?
Absolutely. In fact, one of the statistics is that 85 percent of the incremental emissions of CO2 is going to come from developing countries, primarily China and India.
So what do we do?
First, we need to make significant investment in the research and development of carbon capture and sequestration. Carbon-capture technology has been with us for a long time; it's the sequestration [taking carbon that has been captured from coal plants and injecting it into the earth in either liquid or gas form] that is the issue. We are experimenting with lots of technologies to capture, but we have yet to do a major sequestration project.
Given that time is pressing, is there a way to speed this up?
My judgment is that more dollars and more focused effort, like a Manhattan or Apollo project, would accelerate the results. Still, it takes going through a couple of generations of technology, having an operating period of three to five years, to see how it works. There is a significant amount of regulation that will have to be written about who has the liability for the CO2 in the ground. There are a lot of technical issues around storage that need to be resolved, and regulations need to be written with respect to that. And the carbon has to be stored near the places where coal is burned. We really have to understand the geology that underpins those areas.
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Posted By: Jim Johnson @ 10/16/2008 7:57:02 PM
Comment: Obama's view of the future of America - Socialism which is the next step to Communism!!
Under socialism a ruling class of intellectuals, bureaucrats and social planners decide what people want or what is good for society and then use the coercive power of the State to regulate, tax, and redistribute the wealth of those who work for a living. In other words, socialism is a form of legalized theft.
The morality of socialism can be summed-up in two words: envy and self-sacrifice. Envy is the desire to not only possess another's wealth but also the desire to see another's wealth lowered to the level of one's own. Socialism's teaching on self-sacrifice was nicely summarized by two of its greatest defenders, Hermann Goering and Bennito Mussolini. The highest principle of Nazism (National Socialism), said Goering, is: "Common good comes before private good." Fascism, said
Mussolini, is "a life in which the individual, through the sacrifice of his own private interests??realizes that completely spiritual existence in which his value as a man lies."
Socialism is the social system which institutionalizes envy and self-sacrifice: It is the social system which uses compulsion and the organized violence of the State to expropriate wealth from the producer class for its redistribution to the parasitical class.
Despite the intellectuals' psychotic hatred of capitalism, it is the only moral and just social system.
Capitalism is the only moral system because it requires human beings to deal with one another as traders--that is, as free moral agents trading and selling goods and services on the basis of mutual consent.
Capitalism is the only just system because the sole criterion that determines the value of thing exchanged is the free, voluntary, universal judgement of the consumer. Coercion and fraud are anathema to the free-market system.
It is both moral and just because the degree to which man rises or falls in society is determined by the degree to which he uses his mind. Capitalism is the only social system that rewards merit, ability and achievement, regardless of one's birth or station in life.
Yes, there are winners and losers in capitalism. The winners are those who are honest, industrious, thoughtful, prudent, frugal, responsible, disciplined, and efficient. The losers are those who are shiftless, lazy, imprudent, extravagant, negligent, impractical, and inefficient. [What about the role of luckbeing in the right place at the right time or the wrong place at the wrong time? R. R. Pope}
Capitalism is the only social system that rewards virtue and punishes vice. This applies to both the business executive and the carpenter, the lawyer and the factory worker.