I must say - Cenk calls out the flaws on both sides and tell it like it is.

I am very curious on the need for coal consumption. It could just be my area - Up here in Canada, we use Hydro Electricity. Coal just seems like such a third world product. It's dirty, anti-envomental, toxic and shortens the lifespans of all who mine it.

Sure it gives people jobs, but given the choice between a longer lifespan and backbreaking labour and a shortened lifespan you would think they would be moving away from coal if possible.

And WTF is "clean coal?"

@Sagemindhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_coal "Historically, the term has been used to refer to technologies for reducing emissions of ash, sulfur, and heavy metals from coal combustion."

KnivesOut is correct, yet keep in mind that "clean coal" does next to nothing to reduce the amount of CO2 released from coal combustion. It also does nothing about the dangers of mining coal, as mentioned by Sagemind, and does nothing about reducing the contamination of the environment via mining.

It's less dirty coal, but it's still dirty, yet they get to call it CLEAN for some reason.

cold fusion, solar, hydrogen fuel cells or GTFO

Calling any coal clean is like calling a puddle of mud "clean water".

>> ^VoodooV:

It's less dirty coal, but it's still dirty, yet they get to call it CLEAN for some reason.
cold fusion, solar, hydrogen fuel cells or GTFO


Name 3 things that won't work in time for it to matter!

Go gen4 reactors, lots of them, and now! I recommend David MacKay's book "Sustainable Energy - without the hot air" as to why I believe this. Available for free at http://www.withouthotair.com/

Video reference here:

http://videosift.com/video/TEDxWarwick-Physics-Constrain-Sustainable-Energy-Options


But ya, coal needs to go, but you have to remember, 2 billion people live in abject poverty. They try to bridge the gap using as cheap a source of energy they can...like coal. Until you make energy cheaper than coal, your never going to displace the use of dino fuels around the world. The physics on fusion, solar, and hydrogen can't answer that call for quite awhile (we have been trying to make fusion work for decades, same with solar, and fuel cells are just terrible right now and only work for transportation fuels not baseload power generation). I do think we can answer a large number of these problems with new generations of nuclear power, with passive safety and no emissions, gen4 reactors have a lot of great points if people give them a chance!

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-deathprint-a-price-always-paid/

In relation to the direct content of the video, your NEVER going to get China and India on board with giving up cheap energy...they are BOTH x3 the population of the US, they have to care about cheap energy WAAAAY more than us, for population and standard of living issues. The only way to win this isn't through regulation, it is through technological innovation...and China has been buying up our AP1000 Gen3 for all the reasons I just mentioned.

To say that dino fuels are "Destroying us" is a little bit of a misnomer, you don't get food without hydrocarbons, you don't have refrigeration without hydrocarbons, you don't get heating and cooling without hydrocarbons. Energy isn't the enemy, any attempts to price out energy will only hurt the most reliant on its low price...if you doubled the price of gas via taxation, you aren't helping the little man. Cheap energy prices, even if they are oil based, aren't the devil, any attempts to make them so is a misunderstanding of the energy crisis. More oil drilling isn't even going to lower costs, at best, it will keep them the same, but peak oil in the US has already come, more drilling in more exotic places is just going to tow the line...and it isn't even going to do that.

Talking about clean coal is just so "we" can talk about how much we need cheap energy without talking about the health effects. Coal does kill, without a doubt, but so does electricity so costly you can't afford heating or cooling. You can't call for an elimination of coal without talking about what is going to replace it, and at what cost. This is even MORE relevant with the recent spout of weather, imagine if that area was packed full of solar and wind...it most likely be completely destroyed, and those are already very cost heavy forms of energy.

Anyway, I will end the rant. I really recommend the book above if you wish to delve down the rabbit hole of energy solutions. It isn't as easy as you think, it is why we are still using dino fuels. Any path you choose is challenging, and VERY capital and R&D intensive. Were are talking multiple trillion dollars to role out replacements on a national scale. Now, oil does a trillion a year, so this isn't outside the realm of possibility, but it is going to take a technical answer to solve, not a political one.

It partly explains voter apathy on the Dem side. Obama was sent to the White house with a clear mandate (which he ran on), and he largely ignored it or "compromised" it away after he got there. And don't post me a link to that "lookie at what all Obama's done" page. It's horseshit. This election, many Dems are just voting for Obama because he's not Romney.

Also, fusion has been 30 years away for about 40 years now. How about a Manhattan Project-level effort towards that? In the meantime, let's help Japan build their space elevator so we can have a safe method of disposing all the nuclear waste from all the nuclear power plants we are going to need to build until fusion is viable.

@Fletch I humbly suggest keeping radioactive materials in large quantities out of the jet stream, plus they have lots of goodies in there once we are smart enough to extract them (and with new laser technology like the Silex Process, that might be really soon!)...but I am totally for a space elevator, lets start tomorrow afternoon, I have it off.