More Environmental Terrorism - Coal is BAD!

Again, the environmentalist are dictating what is right and moral when it comes to our private lives. The politicians, along with the eco-terrorists, are right there to jump on the band wagon as they see themselves as protectors of our very souls.

Can it be that we, as private citizens, will sit back and watch and wait for the lights to brown-out as demand for more electrical power keeps going up?

Our economy is growing faster than the power companies can meet the demand, but apparently this means nothing to average citizens as a majority of us believes the enviro's are right. How can this be? Where's the common sense?

Okay, who will be to blame when your air conditioner doesn't work or your TV blinks out during the ball game? Yeah, I know, George Bush or the damn power companies that just what another reason to raise the rates.

Look in the mirror people - It's you ! - If you allow the New Socialist Progressive Party, liberal Democrats, to gain power, not only will you pay more, but you get less power for your home and, by the way, less fuel for you car and, again, pay more for getting less.

If you are willing to sacrifice everything for a scam, a fraud that is global warming, then don't blame me, I called my representatives - you live with the thought that you did nothing to prevent it - one of the results of our inaction will be roasting in the summer and freezing in the winter. You chose.

Read this article about energy demands and give it some serious thought - then Keep the faith, the battle is joined

Lights Out in America
By PATRICK MCILHERAN
April 4, 2008

There are plans to rebuild an old power plant along the Mississippi River by a Wisconsin utility. It boasts "clean coal," dramatic cuts in pollution, and the way it'll be able to burn local farm waste.

Greedy, filthy swine, say environmentalists: Alliant Energy is using "the worst of the worst available technologies," as one big group, Clean Wisconsin, put it to supporters.

So what is it, heaven or hell? The answer may help the nation stay out of power limbo. Alliant's plan to rebuild its power station in Cassville, Wis., will use technology developed in the late 1980s which was lauded as clean coal until recently. The problem is that environmentalists have moved the goalposts. The system Alliant will install is called circulating fluidized bed combustion. In it, high-pressure air keeps bits of coal swirling around with limestone in the burner. The limestone absorbs almost all sulfur dioxide, while the design of the burners means they put out much less nitrous oxide.

Scores of other power plants have upgraded themselves over the past two decades by using the circulating fluidized bed combustion technology, which has dramatically cleaned up exhaust. Sulfur dioxide and nitrous oxide are the chief pollutants of acid rain. Keeping them out of the air was the federal government's goal in sinking piles of money into clean coal research. The payoff has been power plants that pollute much less and can easily burn biomass, fashionably turning local cornstalks into power.

Very nice, but that's so 1980s now. The plants still put out carbon dioxide — known until a decade ago as "the stuff you exhale" — and so environmentalists decry them as Dickensian pimples on the face of Mother Earth. Clean Wisconsin now warns about how much "global warming pollutant" — carbon dioxide — the plant will put out. The group is demanding the plant be redesigned to gasify its coal before burning it and to capture all the carbon dioxide. Nice idea, but this hasn't been done commercially anywhere in this country.

Another Wisconsin utility, WE Energies proposed building a pilot plant near Milwaukee and got turned down by state regulators because of expense. The federal Department of Energy called off its big carbon capture demonstration plans in Illinois in February, citing costs. "It's just not ready yet," according to an Alliant spokesman, Rob Crain, "And we just don't have the luxury of waiting for it to be ready. "So the company, which sees its demand rising by between 2% and 3% a year even as it aggressively pushes conservation, plans its new plant.

The environmentalists are all over it for using demon coal, even though the plant will put out 90% less sulfur dioxide to generate 500 megawatts in comparison to the 200 megawatts it currently generates. The new technology is more efficient, so it will even put out less carbon dioxide per megawatt, and researchers say it's adaptable to capturing the carbon when the technology becomes economically viable. No matter: It is still tainted by the sin of coal.

This gives us insight into the thinking of the campaign against coal. As the real harms of coal have been incrementally reduced, some of those most fervently opposed to it have shed nuance and embraced a more uniformly dark view. For instance, the possibility of gasification has fissured environmentalism, with some groups backing it and others opposed. The sequestered carbon dioxide would have to go somewhere, and some fret that it might escape. Others argue that even if all the carbon were caught, mining still makes disagreeable holes in landscapes.

Yet others say that coal's abundance eases the pressure on Americans to use less power by living simpler lives. All these objections leave one suspecting that, should gasification work out commercially, the goalposts would move again.

Irish pubs apparently sat out last weekend's worldwide "Lights Out" hour in which people were urged to turn off lamps to show concern about the climate. Too much risk, apparently, of tipsy patrons burning disagreeable holes in themselves with candles. It was telling that the protest centered on doing without a hallmark of civilization — light. It was illustrative that the bars decided the benefit wasn't worth the price.

Coal is not evil but represents a series of such trade-offs. Fluidized bed combustion, for instance, adds complexity and cost to building a power plant, but it satisfies tougher air rules. Part of the reason Alliant says it must build its new plant is that ethanol distilleries are adding hundreds of megawatts of demand — that, and people really do prefer electric light to candles.

All these trade-offs are defined by circumstances specific to a time or place, so they'd best be decided by people nearest the situation. They should also be premised on a practical fact: That the availability of affordable power is the nonnegotiable.

By contrast, declarations that new coal plants can't be tolerated or that infeasible gasification is the only permissible path stem from a moralistic view that no pollution is justified. So when carbon dioxide is reclassified as a pollutant, as the Supreme Court ruled last year, coal plants come under vehement attack. No matter that they provide half the nation's power, they are aging and must be opposed as sin. Incremental steps won't do. Now that they can be made less polluting they must be replaced.The trouble is that, once the goalposts move, we're left with no way forward that doesn't involve turning off the lights.

Mr. McIlheran is a columnist for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel