As Ross Gelbspan blogged today, the Group of Eight (G-8) has pledged to reduce carbon emissions by 50% by 2050. It makes for great headlines, but the small print shows several things: they failed to set a short term emissions reduction goal, and a large part of their Grand Forty-Two Year Plan is to go "low-carbon" by - you guessed it - using carbon capture and sequestration, also known as the "clean coal" pipe dream.
The Wall Street Journal's "Environmental Capital" blog nailed it:
[...]
But in the medium and long term, meeting the group’s goal of cutting emissions “will depend on the development and deployment of low-carbon technologies in ways that will enable us to meet our sustainable economic development and energy security objectives. In this regard, we emphasize the importance and urgency of adopting appropriate measures to stimulate development and deployment of innovative technologies and practices.”
The G-8 statement elaborates on these "technologies":
"Environmental Capital" brings up one ironic point. The DoE officially backed out of its partnership with FutureGen, due to ballooning expenses:
With the US Department of Energy's promise to pay for 75 percent of the project costs now topping out at over US$1.3 billion, even the coal loving, big spending US President decided the price for the unnecessary and unproven CCS technology was too high.
But, what is most noteworthy is the incredible myopia and folly of the G-8 proposal.
As we have emphasized over and over again here at Coal Is Dirty:
- The first CCS plant won't be available in the commercial sector until at least 2030. The United Nations Development Program sums it up with "CCS will arrive on the battlefield far too late to help the world avoid dangerous climate change..." (pdf).
- CCS is a dangerous distraction. A Greenpeace report references the IPCC, which has concluded that CCS is prohibitively expensive, dangerous and destructive to local ecosystems, potentially dangerous to humans, and would require significant additional energy input (see the IPCC's technical summary and summary for policymakers, both pdfs). These are only a few of the problems.
In other words, the G-8 statement is simply lipstick on a pig - the "clean coal" lobby, that is. It is not a solution to climate change due to man-made carbon emissions.
The G-8 countries are deluding themselves.
If they can't fool the Wall Street Journal, who are they fooling besides themselves?
Alavert
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