Utility Shelves Ambitious Plan to Limit Carbon

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/14/business/energy-environment/utility-shelves-plan-to-capture-carbon-dioxide.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=utility%20shelves%20plan&st=cse

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Thu, Jul 14, 2011 at 10:36 AM
Subject: re: Utility Shelves Ambitious Plan to Limit Carbon
To: letters@nytimes.com


To the Editor:

   The AEP carbon-capture plan was always a boondoggle, aimed at capturing federal subsidies more than carbon.  To mine coal (which is almost 100% carbon) and re-bury carbon dioxide (which is 27%carbon) you need a repository several times larger than the initial mine. It doesn't exist and never will. Coal is a terrific form in which to sequester carbon; it has worked for 200 million years. We can't afford to go on digging and burning it.

     If we are serious about undoing the damage we've wrought on our atmosphere and oceans since the Industrial Revolution, we need to be re-sequestering carbon not as carbon dioxide by as "biochar" or "anthropogenic peat".  Photosynthetic plants are already stripping twenty times as much carbon from the atmosphere as all of human activity contributes, year by year and hour by hour. We just have to keep some of the cellulose they're making from rotting back into the atmosphere.

Barry Haskell Levine