Okay, a little more on coal, re my post below.
Some of my commenters are such...unreasonable creatures! Look. No one thinks the world is going to stop burning coal. Literally no one that I know of, the most flaming liberal greenies I've ever spoken to, believes that the world is going to get along without burning coal anytime soon.
Do people out there really think I don't know that half of America's electricity supply comes from coal? Of course I know that. That's Energy 101. And I know how much coal there is in the world yet to be mined. Loads. A century or two's worth, maybe more.
And when I write, as I did last week, about the 487 million people in India who don't have access to electricity and how I find that shocking, isn't the obvious implication that I think they ought to have electricity? And the cheapest and surest way to get them electricity: coal. It's a given. Everyone knows this. Those of you who think you're telling us things we don't know are really being pretty boring.
The conversation is about the costs of burning coal, which are real and serious, and whether those costs can realistically be reduced, which is very open to debate. Anyone who says "burn coal and shut up and enjoy it if you want your air conditioning and computer" is just being ignorant. You belong to Bush's era. The Obama world will leave you behind.
The policy answer? It is long-term and difficult and doesn't fit in a blog post or a slogan. It involves burning coal, investing in making the costs of burning coal as low as possible, vastly increasing investments in other sources of electricity (yes, including nuclear in the right cases, and they do exist), reducing our usage, investing heavily in alternatives, retrofitting large commercial properties, rapidly expanding solar power in particular through credits and rebates to encourage the emergence of a huge residential and small-commercial solar-panel industry, and so on and so on and so on.
But a politician who just says "coal coal coal" is not being part of the solution. It's just as ignorant as "shut up and burn."
