Over and over we hear from dirty fuel advocates that the U.S. needs to use slop like tar sands and high sulfur coal so that it does not get shipped to places like China where the environmental standards are considered significantly weaker...

 So an edict in China ending work on all but two coal-to-liquid plants in the country was a fascinating development. It seems that the technology has been deemed far too expensive and dirty for continued investment. Let's not forget, this is a country so wedded to coal that they are rolling out a coal plant every week---and this technology is unacceptable to them.

So why are we still looking at coal-to-liquids in America?

Billions of dollars are being thrown at Ohio's BAARD plant and Pennsylvania's Gilberton plant, even as consultants in West Virginia question the technology's future.

The same folks pushing coal argue that we cannot take the first step in creating carbon regulations---this is a global problem. 

So, I hope we can find some global agreement on this technology. Let's leave it consigned to history's losers, folks like the Nazis and apartheid-era South Africa who had no other options.

We are in the midst of a global race to develop the new technologies that will power us out of our climate and energy crises. It is the absolute worst time to dabble with a dirty, discredited World War II technology that creates double the climate-changing emissions and discharges an array of dangerous pollutants.

If China has decided to leave coal-to-liquids in history's dustbin because it is too expensive and dirty, why dig it out here when we should be focusing American ingenuity on our own low-carbon future?