GLOBAL WARMING
Subsidies for Sequestration and Coal Plants
The coal industry has long benefited from many Government subsidies and tax breaks. Their promotion of “Clean Coal” as a way to continue coal burning while decreasing Global Warming impacts has spawned a significant increase in tax dollars dedicated to supporting coal combustion. Despite the federal government dedicating 2.2 Billion dollars to accelerate CCS deployment in recent years, very little has been done. While engaging in an active campaign to distort the scientific evidence and cast doubt in the public’s mind regarding the reality and urgency of the Global Warming problem, the most (almost only) substantive action by the Bush administration to address the problem has been to invest in an unproven technology fix (CCS) that no one expects to be broadly deployable for at least a decade and which, based on best current projections, is a bad economic choice. The comparatively meager support for renewables and even less for efficiency measures shows that the federal government is intervening in the market, choosing to support Coal Companies and Utilities. If the government is going to choose our energy future, they should be able to explain why that choice is best for the public and not just for a few large corporations. We have not found that evidence yet.
Below find a number of items documenting the extent of Government support for coal.
Energy Secretary Scraps FutureGen Clean Coal Project
WASHINGTON, DC, January 31, 2008 (ENS)
Bodman said the president's Fiscal Year 2009 budget requests $407 million for coal research, including development of more efficient gasification and turbine technologies, innovations for existing coal power plants, and large-scale CCS injection tests, and $241 million to demonstrate technologies for cost-effective carbon capture and storage for coal-fired power plants, including $156 million for the restructured FutureGen approach and $85 million for DOE’s Clean Coal Power Initiative.
"This $648 million request represents a $129 million increase from the president’s FY2008 request and is the largest amount requested for DOE’s coal program in more than 25 years," said the energy secretary.
A N.Y. Times report on the 2008 stimulus package includes the following. The money for home efficiency measures was not passed.
Senate Democrats tried to pressure Republicans on Monday to vote for a $159 billion economic stimulus plan, including $1 billion in additional subsidies for home energy, instead of a cheaper, more streamlined package approved by the House last week.
Republicans said some of the larger cost was for extraneous proposals, including more than $200 million in tax incentives for the coal industry sought by Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, Democrat of West Virginia.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/05/washington/05fiscal.html?th&emc=th
This comes from a successful Venture Capitalist who is promoting thermal solar plants, he does not give a citation for the quote, but the rest of his information appears accurate and it gives a good rundown, strait from the White House, on the subsidies for coal. Full white paper p29.
One of the common criticisms regarding renewables vs. coals is that the latter is “cheap”– a misguided perception, considering coal’s long history of feeding at the public trough and not pricing in externalities like pollution. To quote directly from the chairman of the White House council on Environmental Quality – (in a letter responding to a Tom Freidman article on the need for cleaner technology):
“Although not reported in major media, on Nov. 30 2007 the Treasury Department awarded nearly $1 billion in tax credits to help offset the cost of nearly $10 billion in private investment to build nine advanced coal projects. The Energy Department also awarded a $235 million grant to match $300 million by a private utility to build a coal gasification facility in Florida. With another $650 million in tax credits this year leveraging billions more in private dollars, we should produce more than a dozen commercial-scale coal projects holding the promise of lower carbon dioxide.
This builds on the $2.2 billion President Bush dedicated to clean coal research that culminates with the Energy Department's FutureGen initiative, a $1 billion international partnership to build and operate the world's first coal-fueled, near-zero emissions power plant by 2012.”The letter alone details approximately $3.5 billion in subsidies just in the near term. The WorldWatch Institute estimates that worldwide, there were about $60 billion in coal subsidies annually (as of 1999 – it is likely the number has come down slightly since then).(49) Even today, “market” coal gets far more subsidies than developmental technologies like solar energy. Time magazine notes that in 2007, federal funding for coal R&D is at $427 million – while solar power received just $159 million.(50)
49 http://www.worldwatch.org/node/1657
50 http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1645166,00.html
Read The Department of Energy's Office of Fossil Energy FY 2009 coal budget.
The following chart may suggest why the coal companies and utilities are fairing so well in Washington.
