The Oil Drum

99 comments on A few reviews of Lomborg's "Cool It"

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Valuethinker on September 30, 2007 - 5:46pm

You'd have to make an unrealistic assumption about extractable coal reserves (plus shale to oil, tar sands etc.) to believe that we don't have enough fossil fuels to really wreck the Earth's climate.

We do. And then there's deforestation.

Peak coal is a neat idea, but there is a lot of coal out there, especially when you throw in the brown coal in places like Poland and the eastern states of Germany.

If we can blow the top off Kentucky mountains, then we can get at that coal.

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Nick on September 30, 2007 - 6:39pm

Coal is almost entirely used for electrical generation, these days.

At least in the US, there's an easy substitution with wind, which is only a couple of cents per kwh more than coal (and cheaper, if you internalize all the external costs). Wind was 20% of new generation in 2006, and growing 40% per year. I think we could put a moratorium on all new coal plants, if we really wanted to. It might take a bit of demand management to handle peak demand periods, but it's pretty doable. In 10 years we could grow wind to the point that we started reducing coal useage.

I find that encouraging.