Energy Probe

Not Under My Back Yard -- the phenomenon of citizens' groups organizing to stop the burial of carbon dioxide under their communities -- succeeds again, this time in Ohio's Darke County, where Citizens Against Carbon Sequestration successfully fought off a proposed $92.6-million carbon storage plan. Their 14-month protest effort involved yard signs, public meetings and a prayer rally.

Governments are enthusiastically pushing coal on the assumption that carbon capture and storage technologies will work.

India loves the UN's climate change policies and so does India's representative at the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Rajendra Pachauri.

Why the love-in? The Indian government's new "National Action Plan on Climate Change," which Pachauri helped craft, plainly explains why: The UN formally establishes that global warming is a matter of secondary importance to India, allowing the world’s largest democracy to pursue its own best interests.

Coal is back, despite -- and perhaps also because of -- attempts to beat it back.

Britain abandoned coal big time after Maggie Thatcher privatized the energy industry system in the 1980s. With the energy industry forced to meet market tests, coal fields were shut down, coal-fired power plants were shut down, and coal-related emissions plummeted. Economic efficiency worked wonders for both the economy and the environment.

Energy policy isn't just consuming U.S. lawmakers. It's also dominating the Canadian agenda and particularly the province of Ontario.

The current government there recently unveiled its long-term supply roadmap that plans to double the amount of renewable energy by 2025 and refurbish or replace the province's base-load nuclear capacity. But it also expects to phase-out the use of coal-fired generation by 2014 -- a strategy that had to be put off for seven years.

Coal, chock-full of substances of known toxicity, epitomizes dirty fuel. The perils in coal burning – and this is an abbreviated list – include fly ash and heavy metals such as arsenic, lead, mercury, sulphur., vanadium, beryllium, cadmium, barium, chromium, molybdenum, zinc, selenium, radium, uranium and thorium. If these substances and their byproducts are not controlled in coal burning, to keep emissions within safe levels, human health and the environment can suffer.

If the United States imposes meaningful economic sanctions on Iran, let alone tries a military strike against its nuclear facilities, Iran threatens to play its oil card. Many fear Iran will make good on its vow to "halt oil supply to the last drop" through the Strait of Hormuz, conduit for 40% of the world's oil exports; others fear Iran will cut back its own oil production.

Faced with the undeniable reality of "Hubbard's Peak" in global conventional oil supplies, the world's largest multinational energy corporations are now hell-bent on squeezing oil out of tar in northern Alberta, like junkies desperately conniving for one last giant fix in a futile attempt to quench America's insatiable "addiction to oil" (described so eloquently by President George Bush II). Along the Athabasca River near Fort McMurray, a sub-arctic town almost 1,000 kilometres north of the U.S.

A report by Energy Probe says coal-fired power stations such as Nanticoke's aren't as big a polluter as originally thought.
The report says two of the units at the Lambton generating station near Sarnia rank in the top 10 cleanest in North America.
Energy Probe executive director Tom Adams says it makes no sense to shut down Ontario plants and import large amounts of power from dirtier coal-fired stations in the U-S.