EPA Mandates Cap and Trade 3.0/ Congress Remains Irrelevant

The Extreme Political Activists, (also known as the EPA, or Environmental Protection Agency) of the Obama administration recently announced new carbon emissions limits for all future coal-fired power plants in the U.S.  that will require all new coal-fired power plants to cut their carbon emissions by approximately 50%.  Just how does EPA head environmental activist Lisa Jackson propose that these power plants acquire such a drastic reduction in carbon emissions?   By using CCS technology that requires the capturing of carbon dioxide, and storing it underground, which is a technology that in her own words, will not even be commercially available for 10 years. “Every model that we’ve seen shows that technology as it develops will become commercially available certainly within the next 10 years”, stated Jackson.  Apparently, back in 2008 while campaigning for President, when Barack Hussein Obama told a reporter that under his plan “energy prices would necessarily skyrocket” he certainly meant it.

Lord Moncton summed up the CCS technology Obama’s EPA is using as it’s main weapon in their war on affordable energy today as follows:

There are clear remedies that could be applied to conventional pollutants. The particulate issue can be rectified by covering stockpiles of coal, dampening and more efficient transportation. The toxic trace elements issue could be resolved by the introduction of ultrasuper-critical coal technology. This technology is not only greatly more efficient than all other forms of energy production but because it operates at such high temperatures it eliminates most of the real pollutants such as the oxides and mercury.

Coal companies are making a strategic error here. They should acknowledge and rectify the well-known coal-related pollutants, and argue the lack of merit of AGW theory, instead of hiding behind the chimera of Clean Coal or carbon capture technology [CCS]. The problems of CCS are obviously insurmountable: the energy required to capture the CO2 emissions when the coal is burnt requires about as much energy as the coal produces. Secondly, the final sludge containing the captured CO2 requires a storage space about 30 times the size of the quarry from which the coal was mined. To date CCS has cost the Australian taxpayers and the coal industry about $400 million. The coal industry could have solved the particulate problem and made a start on introducing ultrasuper-critical technology.