re: #129 Cato the Elder

Not only that.

We are going to be burning coal for the foreseeable future. Asswipes like Greenpeace are anti-coal absolutists. “There’s no such thing as Clean Coal”, they whinge.

But:

1) We are going to be burning coal for the foreseeable future.

2) Any gains made in terms of improved combustion efficiency and/or CO2 sequestration are gains, period.

3) Pretending we can stop burning coal is for people who live in unicorn-land.

4) Fuck Greenpeace.

Well, first off there is no such thing as clean coal. There are ways to mitigate the emissions from coal plants but there is absolutely no way to reduce those emissions some level that is sustainable and still produce all the electricity we demand. The numbers just do not add up for coal. Inthis case Greenpeace is correct, though of course,, numbers and science are not so much their thing.

This is why nuclear is so very important.

We can not build a giant wind farm that would say power NY and the distribution network it would need fast enough to do the job on its own. For that technology to be fully realized, we would have to have every user hooked into powerful batteries to store unused energy and a smart grid to redistribute it.

That is possible and certainly part of the solution, but not in time.

We could however start building nuclear plants tomorrow.