Peabody gets 6%? Pretty cheap for letting China feed on your technology body.

China will build 1000 coal-fired powerplants. How many plants will Peabody be allowed to build? How soon will Chinese companies strip Peabody of its tech? How soon will Peabody NOT be the largest coal company? How long will it be before one of the Chinese companies is the largest? They don't call company espionage by that term anymore...its called partnering?

litesong:

All very good questions and the answers are almost as well known. Using the past 10 years + current and future growth rate differential between USA and China you could come up with an approximate year.

Romans probably asked themselves similar questions between 400 AD and 450 AD

However, USA could wake up and redirect resources from external useless oil wars to internal (new) clean energy economy. A few $$$ billion could make a worthwhile difference in the next 8-10 years.

Also, new taxes could be based on GHG created to produce + use all products we consume. Very clean/green products such as solar panels, wind mills, electric vehicles, ESSUs, etc could have negative taxes. At the other extreme, dirty coal fired power plants + polluting ICE vehicles + all fuel extracted from Alberta tar sands should be taxed much more or enough to finance all the negative taxes stated above.

Are Americans ready for this new economy? If not, others will do it and USA will fall behind fast enough.

Um this is bushes accord with china in action. They WANT china to get clean coal tech as soon as possible thats why we invented it in the first place. It would have been insane to spend all that tax money on clean coal and then not share it with the soon to be grand poobahs of coal.

At the 2005 level of world fossil fuel use, halting human contributions to global warming would require capturing and permanently storing more than one thousand cubic miles of CO2 every year. This is impossible. We need to stop wasting time and money on the delusion of "clean coal".

Richard:

Clean burning coal sounds so good even if it is not true.

Capturing all or most of the CO2 produced with all those 'clean coal' power stations and sending it next door or down under sounds good too.

Using the surplus CO2 or transforming it to a usefull clean fuel would be better but nobody knows how to do it yet.

OTOH, there are other (known) cleaner ways to use coal as a source of energy but it would cost more. It would be anti-american to do that. We must have the cheapest source of energy regardless of the GHG produced. That's our way to do things.

For China and India to do it too is not acceptable. We will sue them with 1000 lawyers, find ways to ban their products etc. Our right to pollute is not negotiable.

Actualy clean coal is indeed clean and american.. The thing is the co2 is just replacing the co2 the oil companies were generating already to... dry clean oil fields;/

Its far better then water and stream and far far cheaper too.

And far more importantly it allows the coal plant to burn brown and green coal instead of expensive black coal... and with a few mods bitumen as well likely..

And its green.

Anyway we are screwed no matter whast they do and the us china india and japan and likely a fair number of others know it. But give people hope... it makes em alot easier to kill.