http://www.freepublictransit.org

the beginning of the end of autosprawl

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1) As far as I know, carbon sequestration is only being proposed for new coal plants. Nobody, at least nobody I’ve heard of, has yet figured out how to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

2) Treehugger explains that carbon sequestration takes a lot of energy out of coal plants (never mind being a costly technology), thus reducing the ER/EI of coal

3) The abovecited article also suggests that there really isn’t that much room in the world for effective storage of CO2.

4) This is probably a scam meant to keep the coal industry going. The intellectual trend of the present moment is that of saving capitalism for a dying planet, which intersects with the Democratic Party’s drive to take back the White House in the ways described in this comment.

2) the actual wording of DeAnander’s Law is it is always more profitable to do things wrong — which is not quite the same thing as “everything done for profit is insane,” but is the same thing as “everything done for maximum profit is insane.” [this implies that compound interest -- which forces the seeking of maximum growth and maximum profit to pay geometrically compounding debt (a verbose way of saying "it's usurious") -- is insane or at least leads to insanity.]

Carbon sequestration is a symptom of exactly the same mentality as freshwater flush toilets, CAFO, and FTZs: the idea being that if a problem is moved elsewhere, it stops being a problem. The so-called solution is displacement rather than transformation, and the delusion is that there is an “outside” or a “somewhere else” on which the problem can be dumped consequence-free. We could go at length into the roots of this naive and dangerous belief (many people have) but basically all we need to know is that it’s bunk: there’s no such thing as “somewhere else”, all pipers are paid in the end, and moving a problem around is not a solution, just a way to waste more energy.

As the old joke goes — “Doctor, it hurts when I do this.” == “So don’t do that.” The solution to carbon emissions is to stop generating carbon emissions, or at least to stop generating them in the obscene quantities we are belching out today. Any other scheme for moving them around, hiding them under the rug, dumping them over the fence when we think the neighbours are asleep, etc. is (a) childish and (b) another excuse for a Pharaonic boondoggle like the Alberta tar sands project or the occupation of Iraq.

We need a new name for these climate disaster profiteers, and I propse to call them Carbonbaggers.