the one that didn't get away

If the cheapest power plant is the one that you don't have to build, then the best carbon dioxide is the amount that doesn't get released - and that you don't have to capture and store.

The Dept of Energy's Secretary Samuel Bodman pulled the plug on its $1 billion plus boondoggle with Futuregen that would build a plant in Illinois to explore the large-scale feasibility of burning coal without releasing CO2 into the atmosphere. Instead, the CO2 would be captured and stored underground. The expanding and unforseeable expenses in that technology blew it out of contention, but it should also be nixed forever because of the questionable safety of the gas being sequestered securely (it could leak and escape or blow up and escape), and the inability of the earth to reabsorb that carbon in a stable fashion (the way oil and coal and gas have been for millions of years). These concerns alone should put a cabash on CCS (carbon storage and sequestration, or storage) as a viable alternative to renewable energy.

And let us not forget that the coal has to be dug up first, which not only causes the loss of 1000s of lives world-wide in harvesting the stuff, but also destroys the land that harbors it.

The best CO2 is the stuff that stays in the ground. Sun and wind, and perhaps other possible sources that we have yet to discover, do not create CO2 so we don't have to worry about capturing it or storing it or even reabsorbing it. Or paying huge costs to clean up a mess we did not need to create. (CSS means that we pay twice for our energy: getting it and using it, and storing its waste forever.) We should take our billions of dollars and put them into research and development of those truly clean fuels. We need to harness the energies of power sources that no one can own, and that cannot be put at the mercy of one grand industry or cluster of nations. (How interesting that the least researched energy sources are the ones that cannot be owned and thus sold at market fluctuating prices!)

Secretary Bodman did the right thing but for the wrong reason. Let him - and others - know that R&D in the right places can get us where we want to go if we would only invest wisely and well and abundantly in them.