CCS uses freshwater so in China/India may not be economical assuming depleting water tables like in Mexico City. I don’t care about these piece-meal projects but if you scale entire coal industry minus carbon price, you get another large consumer of stressed Asian water supplies.
My point about CCS R+D funding was there are “right wing” ways to address one’s political base and address AGW too; cellulose ethanol is another.

Regarding buying out coal plants and closing or converting them. I like the way you think.

Regarding the CNN interview of John Christy. Christy is resurrecting the heat island argument and suggesting that we don’t have to worry about global ice melt, which he calls hysteria.

He claims that:
“As you and I are talking today, global sea ice coverage is about 400,000 square kilometers above the long-term average – which means that the surplus in the Antarctic is greater than the deficit in the Arctic.”

Apparently he hasn’t seen this:

“Climate Change and Black Carbon Causing ‘Super-Rapid’ Melt of Himalayan Glaciers”

“These are the world’s greatest repositories of snow and ice outside of the polar regions, and yet they may melt away in just 20 to 30 years, leaving more than a billion people desperately short of water, experts concluded in San Diego this week.”

“Kennel told IPS that nearly all of the 20,000 glaciers in the Himalaya-Hindu Kush mountain ranges are in retreat and the meltwater from some has created enormous lakes held back by rockslides that will inevitably burst, endangering anyone living in the valleys below. The World Wildlife Fund calculates there are 2,000 glacial lakes forming in Nepal and around 20 are in danger of bursting. Several have already flooded valleys in the past two decades in Nepal and Tibet.”

http://westcoastclimateequity.org/?p=2990

[JR: Yes, I wouldn't have given out those 5%. As I've said, the bill ain't perfect.]

Furthermore, should those power plants try to push the envelope and co-fire with more than 15% biomass (in terms of heat input), then they don’t qualify for those free allowances. What’s up with that?

[JR: Again, where is that in the bill. I can't find it.]

This seems like such a stark buying-off of the coal plants, with an added bizarre anti-co-firing twist, that I feel surely I am missing something.

Thanks.

JR,
So are you a supporter of free market economics?

[JR: Where is there a free market? Seriously. Certainly not the U.S. energy market. This is about government doing what is needed to set put a price on pollution that starts to reflect its cost to society.]

It will not hurt to make corps more aware of their power consumption. There are windows with solar cells which generate electricity. Most large corporate buildings have tremendous amounts of windows, all of which could be generating electricity — enough to take the building off the grid during daylight hours. Maybe they could skip their “free” summer picnic and put in some solar windows instead of complaining.

There is also concern about job losses. If a US company begins to build solar equipment such as windows and roof solar cells, and the equipment for feeding it into the building’s electrical system, and excess back out through the meter, then we won’t have a net loss of jobs.

But, there must have been some jobs lost in the carriage industry when Ford began mass producing cars, and there must have been some jobs lost in the whale blubber processing industry when Edison invented the electric light bulb. No doubt the Heritage Foundation wrote a dire report on those industry changes as well.

For DIY info on getting your own home off the grid,
http://www.mindbridge-loa.com/solar-power.html

Thanks,
Nancy