BIDEN ON COAL

NewEnergyNews has and will continue to avoid partisan involvement in the presidential primaries but occasionally one of the thundering horde says something worth thinking about. As is the case with Senator Biden’s remarks to Grist on coal:

Biden on the Record
Amanda Griscom Little, 29 August 2007 (Grist)

WHO
Joe Biden, senior Senator from Delaware, widely respected chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations committee and Democratic presidential candidate

To Biden's credit, he did not talk about CCS as if it was the solution to all our problems. He advocated R & D and he had a rationale worth thinking about.

WHAT
Biden, widely considered one of the most well-informed and insightful men in the Senate, gave an interview to Grist Magazine on the subject of energy. Among his comments were some salient observations on coal.

WHEN
The interview was published on August 29.

WHERE
Biden was campaigning in Iowa when he gave the interview. The observations about coal have to do with China as much as they do with the US.

WHY
- Biden agreed that energy independence and climate change measures could be at odds. He asserted he would oppose subsidies for threats to climate change even if they promised to reduce oil imports.
- Though he did not commit himself to imposing a moratorium on old and dirty coal-fired power plants, he said he believes all new coal plants should be built with carbon-capture-and-sequestration (CCS) capacity.
- He said “clean coal” and “liquefied coal” are not related to energy independence but to climate change and he asserted that R & D for CCS and coal-to-liquid (CTL) technologies should be developed in the US for marketing to China.

Both China and the US are heavily invsted in coal. (click to enlarge)

QUOTES
- Biden on CCS: “China is building one new coal-fired plant per week. That's not going to change unless there's a fundamental change in technology, because they have about 300 years of dirty coal, and they're going to use it.”
- Biden on CTL: “…I don't think [liquefied coal is] the way to go in the U.S., but we could invest in technologies for export. I don't think there's any reasonable prospect that China, as it continues to grow to 1.4 billion people, is not going to use their coal.”
(NewEnergyNews: Following the mine collapse in Utah, Robert Murray showed the world what anybody who had ever heard him pontificate already knew – Big Coal is not to be trusted. But Biden is right – China will only be stopped when New Energy provides a better choice than coal. How about this: (1) Equal subsidies and incentives for R & D on “cleaner coal” and other New Energy, like wind, solar and wave-tide-current. (2) PUT A PRICE ON CARBON!)