Al Gore: Protest new coal-fired power plants

Al Gore -- the former vice president who won the Oscar and the Nobel Prize and I forget what else for his advocacy against global warming -- wants young people to protest the construction of new coal-fired power plants that do not use carbon capture and storage technology.

According to CNN, Gore made his remarks at the opening session of the Clinton Global Initiative annual meeting in New York City last week.

“If you’re a young person looking at the future of this planet and looking at what is being done right now, and not done, I believe we have reached the stage where it is time for civil disobedience to prevent the construction of new coal plants that do not have carbon capture and sequestration,” CNN quoted Gore as saying.

But Gore also likened “clean coal” to “clean smoking.”

“What we should do is make a one off investment to switch our energy infrastructure from one that depends on fuel that is dirty, dangerous, destroying the habitability of this planet and rising in price, to a new global energy infrastructure that is based on fuel that is free forever — the sun, the wind and geothermal. There is a myth that the technology is not available. It is available,” he said.

Okay, Al. If the technology is available, why aren't utilities bringing it to market? Why do they still burn coal and natural gas? And why is nuclear energy about to make a comeback?

The United States and the rest of the developed world are hooked on cheap energy, and coal is about as cheap as it comes for producing large amounts of electricity at the lowest cost. But coal is also the dirtiest fuel available when you track it from the mine to the smokestack.

Clean-coal technology for large-scale use in power plants is still in development. The process works in theory, but clean-coal plants are expensive to build and to operate. American Electric Power, which supplies most of the electricity to this region, wants to build two such plants along the Ohio River between Point Pleasant and Ravenswood, W.Va. One would be at the Mountaineer power plant near New Haven, and the other would be in Meigs County, Ohio, just below Ravenswood.

But AEP has to convince utility regulators in Ohio and West Virginia to allow it to pass on the higher construction costs to consumers.And there is debate over how efficient carbon sequestration and storage technology is.

The process of capturing carbon dioxide and storing it underground could consume large amounts of the electricity a new power plant would produce, reducing the economic benefit. There was an article in Rolling Stone recently about this. This particular article was the first I had read of some of these things. As with any technical matter, though, you need to read a variety of sources before you can be confident of any opinions you form.

Nuclear energy could be making a comeback. Wind power is being developed. Solar power, geothermal energy and hydropower for now are limited by geography. So we're stuck with coal, natural gas and petroleum-based liquids for most of our electricity now.

Gore is right that the world needs to continue working on cleaner sources of electricity. Whether you believe him on global warming or not -- and I'm a skeptic -- it makes sense to reduce the amount of pollution going into the air, land and water from current coal-burning technology.

Until utilities have a proven, economical alternative, they will stick with coal. "Clean coal' -- whatever that is -- is the next step toward the ultimate goal.