Carbon crimes.

• Author: Prugh, Thomas
• Position: Emissions and global warming - Editorial

In the January/February issue of World Watch, writer Susan Moran ("Rush to Coal") detailed the frenzied efforts of U.S. utilities to build more than 150 "new" pulverized-coal power plants before the imposition of increasingly likely federal statutory limits on carbon emissions. I say "new," because the technology is 80 years old and is hardly more advanced than a log fire. Moran's piece, as befits a professional, was matter-of-fact. Here, I want to try to express the outrage her story provokes.

NASA's top scientist, James Hansen, has said we have perhaps 10 years to get a grip on our carbon emissions or else face a tipping point beyond which climate warming spirals irreversibly out of control. The atmosphere already holds too much carbon, but these coal-fired plants will release billions of tons of additional, now-sequestered carbon into the air during their 50-year useful lives. The cheap but antiquated technology slated for the plants is almost impossible to refit later for carbon capture and storage--even if that highly untested process turns out to be workable. The effect would be to accelerate the arrival of Hansen's tipping point. His 10 years may be metaphorical, but time is clearly short.

Which is why building these plants seems lunatic at best. At worst, it's criminal. A satisfying fantasy sprang to mind when I learned of TXU Energy, American Electric Power, Xcel Energy, and the other utilities' calculated rush to coal. It involved the outlawing of carbon crimes--"knowingly and willfully acting to sharply increase the atmosphere's carbon content without provision for redress, and thus, for the sake of...