It's about coal

Continuing on with the subject of climate change, one of the presentations at the Rutgers forum I mentioned in my first blog post that really stuck with me cast doubt not only on emissions trading but on a carbon tax as a way of constraining greenhouse emissions. The point of this presentation was a simple one: both coal and natural gas produce greenhouse emissions, but coal is a much, much cheaper way of producing electricity (when it can be produced close to the source, that is -- otherwise transportation costs can change the relative economics). So in areas where coal is economic, a carbon tax is actually going to have the perverse effect of knocking the cleaner natural gas power plants (cleaner in considering all the other pollutants in addition to carbon dioxide that power plants produce, like sulfur and nitrogen oxides) out of the running before they do coal -- in other words, a carbon tax across the board will make coal more rather than less attractive as our major source of electric generation, unless a really massive amount of renewable or nuclear power is developed to knock coal out of the running as well as natural gas. And the latter development, in the proportions needed to have that effect, is probably a twenty year development project at least, so in the meantime (meaning most of the rest of my lifetime, at any rate) even with a carbon tax we're stuck with coal. And the corollary of this analysis is the equally grim point that if we choose to unilaterally abandon coal, we're probably back in the Laffer argument that the only way we can reduce greenhouse emissions in the short term by any substantial amount is by constraining economic activity... All of this thinking about coal is especially useful for those of us in California who don't use coal to generate electricity in the first place, and so tend to forget how important it is in the rest of the U.S.