I’ve got an op-ed on the Guardian‘s opinion site about — what else? — liquid coal. Here’s how it starts:

They say the first thing you should do when you find yourself in a hole is to stop digging. But if there’s one thing the coal industry loves, it’s digging.

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Generating electricity by burning coal has ravaged the climate, but it’s made coal barons in the US rich. They worried for a while that global warming would mean the end of the gravy train – they’re the ones who started the massive climate-change disinformation campaign back in the 1980s – but instead, to their delight, they’ve discovered that climate change is a gravy train itself.

They’re being showered with government subsidies to develop and deploy carbon capture and sequestration (CCS), whereby the emissions from coal-fired power plants are collected and stored underground. It’s technologically precarious and enormously expensive, but with taxpayers footing the bill, what the hell?

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Now they’ve got a new idea, and it’s audacious. They want taxpayers to fund the creation of another coal industry, one that that would generate liquid transportation fuel from coal (coal-to-liquids, or CTL). Of course, liquefying coal is every bit as dirty as burning it for electricity, so – this is the brilliant bit – they want US taxpayers to simultaneously fund a new set of carbon sequestration projects.

In one fell swoop, using public money to create a dirty industry and public money to clean it up, skimming hefty profits off the top. It’s like a two-rail bank shot of rent-seeking, a bamboozle almost without precedent. Even the ethanol guys must be impressed. You’d almost have to admire it, if it weren’t your money and your climate at stake.

Read the rest.

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