By John Geesman
Green Energy War
Former California Energy Commissioner and Executive Director
President Bush’s “new national goal” announced yesterday, to stop the growth in economy-wide GHG emissions by 2025 and to make power sector emissions peak “within 10 to 15 years, and decline thereafter” rests heavily on technology. As he put it, “There are a number of ways to achieve these reductions, but all responsible approaches depend on accelerating the development and deployment of new technologies.”
Rhetorically, this is a theme lifted straight from the renowned 2002 Frank Luntz GOP message playbook, as previously deconstructed by climate blogger Joe Romm.
Substantively, it amounts to whistling past the graveyard of the Bush Administration’s collapsed ambitions to speed the commercialization of advanced coal technologies that incorporate carbon capture and sequestration. The President’s oratory has walked this path before. “Let us fund new technologies that can generate coal power while capturing carbon emissions,” Bush urged in his January State of the Union Address. The next day his Administration withdrew from its FutureGen project, citing unacceptable cost overruns.
Misunderestimating Bush’s Climate Prattle: Clean Coal Katrina
