Da Aff Peak Coal

8/14/2019 Da Aff Peak Coal

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UMKC SDI 2008 Reactors NegativeLouGie Lab Peak Coal

Peak Coal Answers

Peak Coal Answers..........................................................................................................................................................1 No coal peak....................................................................................................................................................................2Inherency no new coal plants.......................................................................................................................................3

Inherency no new coal plants.......................................................................................................................................4A2: Warming adv peak coal takes it out......................................................................................................................5

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No coal peak

The DOE concludes that we have 200 years of coal reserves

Cathy Booth Thomas. Is Coal Golden? Time Oct. 02, 2006http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1541270,00.html?iid=chix-sphere

Over the next 25 years, the Department of Energy predicts the use of coal will provide an increasing portion of our power--up to nearly 60%,

from 52%. Convened by the Secretary of Energy, the National Coal Council (McCall is a member) has laid out an aggressive energy plan usingcoal over the next two decades. Coal production is expected to soar from 1.1 billion tons a year to 1.8 billion--mostlyfrom the West, especially Wyoming's Powder River Basin. New transmission lines, like the $6 billion Frontier Line, will carry electricityfrom the coalfields of Wyoming to consumers in California. Peabody Energy, the nation's largest coal company, with 2005 sales of $4.6 billion,up 28%, and earnings of $423 million, up 140%, is in acquisition mode worldwide. The Bush Administration has put down its own $2 billion

bet, largely by pursuing FutureGen, a next-generation coal- fired plant promising near zero pollution emissions--all in the hope of making the

nation less oil dependent. The U.S. is, after all, the Saudi Arabia of coal. We have more than 200 years of coal reserves atour current burn rate. There are 440 coal-fired plants across the nation, with proposals to build 153 more in 42 states over the next decade,at a cost of $137 billion, to provide electricity to 93 million homes and support our energy-guzzling lifestyles.

Their arguments about bias are wrong coal reserves are well known and accurately

surveyed

Dave Rutledge, Chair for the Division of Engineering and Applied Science at Caltech. The Coal Question and

Climate Change, The Oil Drum, 6/25 2007 http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2697Oil reserves are rightly viewed skeptically at The Oil Drum, in large part because of fraud by the OPEC countries. Coal reserves arecompiled by the national geological surveys, and unlike oil reserves, they are honest. However, recently Dr. Werner Zitteland Jorg Schindler and their Energy Watch Group have written an important paper Coal: Resources and Future Production that shows that

there are major problems with the reliability of coal reserves, and indicates that the reserves may be too high. Coal is different from oil,and much of the intuition that we may have developed about oil from nights pondering TOD posts is wrong forcoal. Finding oil is hard, and we have not found it all yet. In contrast, people knew where the coal was a centuryago. Once oil is found, it is likely to be produced quickly, so much so that discovery history is routinely used topredict future production. On the other hand, there are large coal fields that are almost undeveloped. As an example,Montana has larger coal reserves than Europe, Africa, or South America, but it is producing less than 0.1% of that coal each year. Ourestimate of future coal production depends a lot on whether we thinkthat thepeople of Montana will get into seriouscoal production. Finally, in contrast to the situation for oil, the world market for coal is only partially developed. Most coal is consumed inthe country it is produced in, and there are large differences in prices, even in the same country. For this reason, we will analyze production ona regional basis. I will apply the techniques to coal that are routinely used here for oil, and consider the consequences for future climate change.

People who are interested in more details can get the spreadsheets with the raw data at my web site, with lots of additional figures and sourcelinks.

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Inherency no new coal plants

No new coal plants legal setbacks and local opposition means that plans for over 100

plants have been scrapped

Lester R. Brown, founder of the Earth Policy Institute, dubbed one of the world's most influential thinkers by theWashington Post and the recipient of 23 honorary degrees, a MacArthur Fellowship, the 1987 UN EnvironmentPrize, the 1989 World Wide Fund for Nature Gold Medal, and the 1994 Blue Planet Prize, the Presidential Medal ofItaly, the Borgstrm Prize by the Royal Swedish Academy of Agriculture and Forestry. U.S. Moving Toward Ban

on New Coal-Fired Power Plants, Earth Policy Institute 2/14/08 http://www.earth-policy.org/Updates/2008/Update70.htm

In a report compiled in early 2007, the U.S. Department of Energy listed 151 coal-fired power plants in theplanning stages and talked about a resurgence in coal-fired electricity. But during 2007, 59 proposed U.S. coal-firedpowerplants were either refused licenses by state governments or quietly abandoned. In addition to the 59 plants that weredropped, close to 50 more coal plants are being contested in the courts, and the remaining plants will likely bechallenged as they reach the permitting stage. What began as a few local ripples of resistance to coal-fired poweris quickly evolving into a national tidal wave of grassroots opposition from environmental, health, farm, andcommunity organizations and a fast-growing number of state governments. The public at large is turning againstcoal. In a September 2007 national poll by the Opinion Research Corporation about which electricity source people would prefer, only 3

percent chose coal. One of the first major coal industry setbacks came in early 2007, when environmental groupsconvinced Texas-based utility TXU to reduce the number of planned coal-fired power plants in Texas from 11 to 3.And now even those 3 proposed plants may be challenged. Meanwhile, the energy focus within the Texas state government isshifting to wind power. The state is planning 23,000 megawatts of new wind-generating capacity (equal to 23 coal-fired power plants). InMay, Floridas Public Service Commission refused to license a huge $5.7-billion, 1,960-megawatt coal plant because theutility could not prove that building the plant would be cheaper than investing in conservation, efficiency, and renewable energy sources. Thisargument by Earthjustice, a non-profit environmental legal group, combined with widely expressed public opposition to any more coal-fired

power plants in Florida, led to the quiet withdrawal of four other proposals for coal plants in the state. Republican GovernorCharlie Crist, who is keenly aware of Floridas vulnerability to rising seas, is actively opposing new coal plants and has announced that thestate plans to build the worlds largest solar-thermal power plant. The principal reason for opposing new coal plants is the mounting concernabout climate change. Another emerging reason is soaring construction costs. And then there are intensifying health concerns about mercuryemissions and the 23,600 U.S. deaths per year from power plant air pollution. (See data.)

No new coal plants local opposition

Lester R. Brown, founder of the Earth Policy Institute, dubbed one of the world's most influential thinkers by theWashington Post and the recipient of 23 honorary degrees, a MacArthur Fellowship, the 1987 UN EnvironmentPrize, the 1989 World Wide Fund for Nature Gold Medal, and the 1994 Blue Planet Prize, the Presidential Medal ofItaly, the Borgstrm Prize by the Royal Swedish Academy of Agriculture and Forestry. U.S. Moving Toward Ban


The Sierra Club, the national leader on this issue, is working with hundreds of local groups to mount legalchallenges in state after state. Other national groups that are actively involved include the Rainforest Action Network, the

Natural Resources Defense Council, and Environmental Defense. Information on the grassroots momentum to oppose coal plants is tracked on

the Web site Coal Moratorium NOW! States that are working to reduce carbon emissions are banding together todiscourage other states from building new coal plants simply because it would cancel their own carbon reductionefforts. In late 2006, for instance, the attorneys general of California, Wisconsin, New York, and several other northeastern states wrote toKansas health officials urging them to deny permits for two new coal power plants of 700 megawatts each. The permits were subsequentlydenied, citing that carbon dioxide is an air pollutant and should be regulated, as determined in an April 2007 Supreme Court ruling. And in a

letter on January 22, 2008, a similar grouping of states urged South Carolinas Department of Health and Environmental Control to refuse apermit for the proposed 600-megawatt Pee Dee coal plant.

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Inherency no new coal plants

No new coal plants no support from Wall Street

Lester R. Brown, founder of the Earth Policy Institute, dubbed one of the world's most influential thinkers by theWashington Post and the recipient of 23 honorary degrees, a MacArthur Fellowship, the 1987 UN EnvironmentPrize, the 1989 World Wide Fund for Nature Gold Medal, and the 1994 Blue Planet Prize, the Presidential Medal of

Italy, the Borgstrm Prize by the Royal Swedish Academy of Agriculture and Forestry. U.S. Moving Toward Ban


Coals future is also suffering as Wall Street turns its back on the industry. In July 2007, Citigroup downgradedcoal company stocks across the board and recommended that its clients switch to other energy stocks. In January2008, Merrill Lynch also downgraded coal stocks. In early February 2008, investment banks Morgan Stanley, Citi,and J.P. Morgan Chase announced that any future lending for coal-fired power would be contingent on the utilitiesdemonstrating that the plants would be economically viable with the higher costs associated with future federal restrictions on carbonemissions. On February 13, Bank of America announced it would follow suit.

No new coal plants Congressional opposition

Lester R. Brown, founder of the Earth Policy Institute, dubbed one of the world's most influential thinkers by theWashington Post and the recipient of 23 honorary degrees, a MacArthur Fellowship, the 1987 UN Environment

Prize, the 1989 World Wide Fund for Nature Gold Medal, and the 1994 Blue Planet Prize, the Presidential Medal ofItaly, the Borgstrm Prize by the Royal Swedish Academy of Agriculture and Forestry. U.S. Moving Toward Ban


In August 2007, coal took a heavy political hit when U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, who hadbeen opposing three coal-fired power plants in his own state, announced that he was now against building coal-fired power plants anywhere in the world. Investment banks and political leaders are beginning to see what has been obvious forsome time to climate scientists, such as NASAs James Hansen who says that it makes no sense to build coal-fired power plants when we will

have to bulldoze them in a few years. In early November 2007, Representative Henry Waxman of California announcedhis intention to introduce legislation that establishes a moratorium on the approval of new coal-fired power plantsunder the Clean Air Act until EPA finalizes regulations to address the greenhouse gas emissions from these sources. If a nationalmoratorium is passed by Congress, it will mark the beginning of the end for coal-fired power in the United States.

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A2: Warming adv peak coal takes it out

Their peak coal argument takes out the warming advantage if the world really runs out

of fossile fuels, it wont be able to burn enough carbon to trigger warming

Richard Heinberg, Senior Fellow at the Post Carbon Institute, former Core Faculty member of New College of

California. Richard Heinberg's Museletter #179: Burning the Furniture, 3/33/2007http://globalpublicmedia.com/richard_heinbergs_museletter_179_burning_the_furnitureFor the most part, climate policy experts have relied upon robust estimates of future global coal supplies. Forexample, the following charts from NASAs James Hansen, one of the worlds foremost climate scientists, showCO2 levels that will result from the burning of remaining fossil fuels given widely accepted reserves levels for oil,gas, and coal, under two scenarios: business-as-usual, and coal phaseout.

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In both charts oil production is not projected to peak until 2020-2030, with a very slow decline thereafter; in the firstchart, emissions from coal production do not peak until 2100. In addition, in the business-as-usual scenarioabsolute levels of production at the time of peaking are much higher than those forecast by ASPO and EWG; theASPO/EWG peaking levels correspond to about 420440 ppm of CO2 versus 575 ppm in Hansons first chart. Forthe sake of comparison, the current atmospheric CO2 level is 390 ppm. According to the International Panel onClimate Change (IPCC), a 420440 ppm peak in CO2 levels may be consistent with a global average surfacetemperature increase of 2 degrees C above preindustrial levels, the critical threshold target for maximum allowableincrease cited by many climate scientists. If ASPO/EWG is correct, this means that oil, coal, and gas resource-and-production limitations may result in declines in CO2 emissions that are more or less in line with what is consideredpolitically feasible for voluntary emissions reductions (the IEA alternative policy scenario).

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