The Carbon Debate

In his article "Bound to Burn" Peter W. Huber proposes a creative an innovative solution to the global warming crisis...burn more coal. The basics of his argument go something like this:
(1) The rest of the world will burn fossil fuels anyway so what does it matter?
(2) Carbon based fuels are cheap and we have plenty of them.
(3) Alternative energy will not be cheap enough to be effective.
(4) Carbon sinking can work.

The most glaring thing I found missing in the article is any discussion of the most obvious problem with coal burning - that being a small thing I like to call environmental collapse. No carbon sinking technology has been found to be anywhere near cost-effective so far. So really all of Huber's suggestions regarding the cheapness of coal fail if we adopt his carbon sinking technology with all this new coal usage. If we don't sink the carbon in the earth then we are left to spew more and more carbon in the atmosphere. Now we can play Bush all day - just try to wish global warming away as a fantasy - but eventually that sort of philosophy comes back to haunt us. You can find yourself a few rogue scientists today who say global warming is not for real. There are also still a few scientists on the fringe who will tell you global warming is not a threat, but the consensus among people who know more than any of us is that global warming can and will cause tremendous environmental AND economic damage if something is not done. At worst Huber's proposal accelerates this phenomenon and makes it irreversible. At best it accelerates it. Even if you don't accept global warming or its consequences, coal burning has real effects on our environment in other forms. The chemicals released by coal burning, such as mercury, already contribute to thousands of deaths by making the air we breathe more toxic.

Now Huber says it is all pointless because the rest of the world will burn carbon fuels anyhow. That is akin to saying that since most of the world is still illiterate we should not bother teaching anyone to read. If we accept that global warming is a real problem, we can't just take the philosophy of "well, we are screwed so might as well light up while we can." Right now the use of carbon fuels is cheap for other countries, such as China, but as demand increases and supplies continue to decrease, prices will rise and alternatives will be more practical. There will always be some people who burn trees for fuel as Huber describes but the vast amount of carbon is released in the production or power to generate electricity and for transportation. We can either be the leaders in developing alternative technologies to generate this electricity or we can just keep burning.

Which brings me to my next point. Huber's proposal is not really a proposal at all...it is simply the status quo. We already generate over 80% of electricity using fossil fuels (and over 50% using coal). We already use oil to fuel over 98% of our transportation. If coal really is the answer why is my energy bill not cheap and my air not clean? Last time I checked my energy bill kept going up, and while gas is relatively "cheap" now, almost every economist will tell you that once demand comes back up, prices will rise again. Coal is plentiful right now but the conservative estimates are that we have a 100 year supply and that coal "peak" will be reached around 2040 at our CURRENT rate of usage. What is more - the coal that is being mined now is the stuff that is the cleanest when it comes to sulfur content and cheapest when it comes to mining. As we continue usage, or increase it as Huber proposes, we will have to use the dirtier coal (if that is possible) and pay more to mine the stuff.

As a last point the anti-alternative always seem to come back to main argument of "fossil fuels are cheap and alternatives are not." My answer would simply be - of course, that is the way it is RIGHT NOW. We have an entire infrastructure built to support fosssil fuels and an established industry to mass produce them which makes them very cheap. Alternative fuels don't have the same infrastructure support or mass production capabilities. Now we can continue to simply rely on what is already established but we already seeing the consequences of that course on both the environmental and economic fronts. In the short term any fuel development will be more expensive than the established system. I still think spending more in the short term to develop alternatives is better than condemning ourselves in the long term by commiting to even more coal usage.