Duke Energy’s CEO admitted on 60 Minutes last night that they haven’t invested any money in clean coal, despite claiming that we will have to say goodbye the American way of life without it. Truth is, carbon capture and sequestration is coming too late and too great of a cost. By their own admission, it would take utilities trillions of dollars to develop the technology by 2050. But it could take even more money to implement the technology and by 2050 it would be too late. What isn’t explored is that we don’t need coal to move to a clean economy.
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Utility companies spent $51 million in 6 months last year lobbying on climate change. Duke, the company profiled in this report, jumped a whopping 57% to $3.4 million in 2008. Their top priority has been to get trillions of dollars to research the technology they claim will keep their business alive. At the same time, they are spending millions to "clean" coal’s image.
Despite the money they are pouring into their lobbying and advertising spin campaign, leading climate experts say that we need to move away from coal. In order to meet the goals that the science demands, climate scientist James Hansen asserts:
We are going to have to phase out emissions from coal within the next 20 years if we hope to prevent climate disasters...not only in this country, but in the world. This is not yet understood. We are going to have to have a moratorium on new coal-fired power plants within the next few years and phase out the existing ones over the next 20 years or so if we have to preserve the climate like the one that has existed the last several thousand years.
So how do we move to a clean energy economy? As David Roberts over at Grist reports, the omission is part of a larger problem of the media leaving the question unanswered despite a plethora of plans that show how we are going to move to a clean energy economy.
Here’s a list of plans (compiled from Roberts’ post):
The science of global warming is clear: we need drastic reductions in carbon emissions by 2050, with or without coal.