Deron Lovaas's Blog
Quenching Our Thirst For Fuel With…Coal?!?
November 14, 2007
Posted by Deron Lovaas in Moving Beyond Oil
Check out our Move America Beyond Oil web site for a funny new cartoon by Mark Fiore about an oldie but baddie: Coal as a liquid fuel.
You read right. The coal industry wants us to run our cars and planes with energy that produces even more pollution than gasoline.
This isn’t a new idea, as Jeff Goodell explains in his book Big Coal: “The Nazis used basically the same process that was commonly used to make “town gas” [a 19th century fuel for lighting] but added a secondary chemical process…creating a petroleum substitute. It was a complex, laborious process, but it worked well enough to fuel Hitler’s dream of world domination…”
Various estimates find that use of this substitute would double global warming pollution compared with conventional gasoline as you can see here and most recently here. And this is just what comes out of the tailpipe! Consider the consequences closer to the source of this fossil, namely increased mining and strip mining. This often includes the removal of actual mountaintops as illustrated by the seeming moonscape below.
(Photo Credit: Daniel Shea)
Why is this happening? Near-$100 oil prices are partly to blame, this sends a signal to the marketplace that substitutes may be in order. I’ve written about this here and (with NRDC colleagues) here.
But it’s not that simple. This is mostly about special interests sidling up to the trough on Capitol Hill as well as coal-state capitols, seeking subsidies courtesy of taxpayers like you and me. Fiore’s cartoonish depiction of that fact would be funnier if it weren’t so true, as you can see in Illinois where coal industry lobbyists have a lot of clout, and here in D.C. as a slew of lobbyists head to Congress looking for handouts in the farm bill.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t want my money fueling global warming. The good news is that without public bucks this pollution parade will have a very hard time getting started.
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- Deron Lovaas
- Vehicles Campaign Director
- Washington, D.C.
- I joined NRDC after working for several other conservation groups and Maryland's Environment Department. I...
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Comments
Rob Perks — Nov 14 2007 03:19 PM
Good enough for the Nazi's eh? So liquid coal is "All Reich" with the coal industry. Figures.
David Ahlport — Nov 15 2007 04:24 PM
If you think coal-to-liquids is bad, biofuels are even worse.
http://greyfalcon.net/lcarough7.png
http://greyfalcon.net/n2ostudy.png
http://greyfalcon.net/palmoil
http://greyfalcon.net/ran
The federal studies on this issue even admit that they intentionally underestimate of the total emissions from biofuels.
http://greyfalcon.net/n2o.png
_
What we really need, is to change the machinery we use to get around.
The CAFE standards now are weaker than they were 30 years ago. It's pathetic.
http://greyfalcon.net/cafe.png
David Brown — Nov 16 2007 01:56 PM
This information is great, e.g. mountaintop removal is something most people are ignorant of. Contrary to the cartoon, CO2 isn't THE worst global warming gas - many manmade chemicals have thousands of times the GWP of CO2 per pound - but CO2 is more common and increasing. But really, I would love to have a conversation with all of America about the lies behind all the "solutions" being proposed, i.e. those that don't require conservation. It's as if most people want to pretend there's some magic. It took millions of years worth of captured solar energy for the plants to store all that CO2 in the ground. We've been releasing that energy and used half of it up in a few hundred years. Current proposals pretend we can "sequester" the CO2 in one generation of plants (that will eventually be harvested, releasing it again), or pump it into the ground and pray that it won't bubble back out (we still don't have underground nuclear waste storage). Proposals to grow biofuel imagine that there's a vast amount of unused arable land (and irrigation water) Under the biofuel (firewood) of 150 years ago, all the forests were stripped, when the population was 1/4 of today's. Can these people not do simple math, or understand high school science??! I don't have the answers, but let's fund research into real technology and stop subsidizing the companies whose only answer is to burn something else.