----- Original Message ----
From: Don Libby <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [email protected]
Sent: Monday, July 21, 2008 4:31:48 PM
Subject: [Global Change: 2737] Re: Climate MAYDAY - Emergency -- As "Coal to
Liquid Fuel" Backers Move to Push for Production Simultaneously in China, India
and the USA
From: John Fernbach
Newsgroups: gmane.science.general.global-change
To: [email protected]
Sent: Monday, July 21, 2008 2:21 PM
Subject: [Global Change: 2736] Re: Climate MAYDAY - Emergency -- As "Coal to
Liquid Fuel" Backers Move to Push for Production Simultaneously in China,
India and the USA
>>When CO2 emission reduction becomes
>>the law of the land, the to-liquid industry coal-will have to comply.
>And we're supposedly to rely on this hope of "working hard to get
>appropriate
>legislation passed" so as to force the coal-to-liquid fuel industry to
>control its CO2 emissions, after the industry has come into existence?
><...>
> How long does the conventional wisdom say it will be before
>effectively regulation of the
>new "synthetic fuel" or coal to liquid fuel industry might
>become law?
Many observers believe the US will have federal carbon emission laws in the
next year or two.
Some are trying to put CO2 emission limits on the coal-to-liquids industry
from the start by making
it a condition for federal start-up funding. For example, see
http://www.boucher.house.gov/images/stories/Boucher/ctl%202007.pdf
And how would you expect to control this industry's emissions, or whether it
"comes
into existence", if not by the passage and enforcement of laws? Apparently
you think
converting coal to liquid fuel is a problem, so what do you propose to do
about it?
-dl
Having worked a little as a journalist on an industry compliance manual, trying
to track EPA's enforcement of one fairly obscure anti-pollution law, I'd say
that mobilizing to stop the industry in its tracks before it's developed would
provide a much better chance of controlling its CO2 emissions than attempting
to regulate it afterwards.
From what I can tell, the United States today doesn't even regulate the strip
mining industry very well, despite enactment of the relevant regulatory
legislation -- the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act, or SMRCRA --
back in 1977.
To touch on another environmental law that doesn't bear on coal mining
directly, the Toxic Substances Control Act, TSCA (Pron. "Tosca") was enacted in
1978 and among other things required that the EPA and the chemical industry
determine the toxicity/environmental effects of all the synthetic chemicals
commonly used in commerce in the US. By the late 1980s, ten years after TSCA's
passage, there were an estimated 75,000 synthetic chemicals that TSCA should
have been covering, and decent research on toxicity had been done for less than
half of them -- I think the number actually was less than 25%.
This suggests to me that it's almost unimaginable that we'll be able to impose
effect environmental controls on a national coal-to-liquid fuels industry, if
one emerges in this country. And while we're waiting for the Messiah to come
and require CO2 sequestration by the synthetic fuel producers -- assuming that
CO2 sequestration proves technically feasible -- this industry is almost surely
going to be pouring its carbon emissions into the atmosphere -- at least if
it's cheaper to do this than it would be to control said carbon emissions.
Again, though -- if I'm wrong about this, and overly pessimistic about the
vigor of Congressional environmental oversight and EPA pollution regulation,
please let me know why I'm wrong.
Or maybe the synthetic fuels industry will voluntarily agree to impose costly
CO2 capture systems on itself, out of corporate good citizenship?????
I'm hardly any kind of expert on coal-to-liquid fuels, but Jeff Goodell, in
"Big Coal," portrays them as a bad idea, and I believe Al Gore has called the
idea of developing this new industry "insane."
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