Peak Oil is You
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Page added on August 14, 2007
‘Cathedral Thinking’
Energy’s Future: Until we solve climate change, says James E. Rogers, we need even the dirtiest fuel.
Every day, Americans plug their cell phones, iPods and laptops into the wall, unaware that most of their electricity comes from coal, the dirtiest form of energy production. Duke Energy, which operates 20 coal-fired power plants, is the third largest producer of carbon emissions in the United States. Yet Duke’s chairman and CEO, James E. Rogers, is an ardent climate-change lobbyist, advocating for emission reductions, carbon trading and cleaner technologies. In the second installment of our series of conversations about the future of energy, NEWSWEEK’s Fareed Zakaria spoke to Rogers about his seemingly awkward balancing act.
Zakaria: Coal is cheap and plentiful, but 40 percent of the CO2 emissions the United States produces come from coal. What should we do?
Rogers: The difficulty with using coal is that when you burn it, it produces significant emissions like sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, mercury and fine particulate, as well as CO2. One of our challenges is to find a way to use this plentiful resource we have and reduce the emissions. We have made significant progress on reduction of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, mercury and fine particulate over the past several decades. We need now to turn our attention to making significant reductions of CO2.
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Everything you are saying here suggests that the only likely positive scenario has at least a 20-year time span. Yet you listen to someone like Al Gore and it sounds like we don’t have 20 years.
That’s why we can’t take anything out of the energy equation
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