Previewing his interview with the CEO of Sasol, a South African company that produces coal-based liquid fuels, chief business correspondent Ali Velshi admitted on CNN’s American Morning on Friday that “There are issues with coal,” but minimized its problems:

There are issues with coal. It’s not the cleanest thing in the world. You see the signs for clean coal, 99 percent clean. I’m not 99 percent clean when I get out of the shower. . . I just look clean.

Watch it:

Velshi’s hygiene is his own business, but it’s no secret that coal is a dirty fuel and Velshi’s “99 percent clean” is false:

– The misleading “clean coal” ads from the coal-industry front group ACCCE only claim that “today’s coal-based generating fleet is already 70 percent cleaner based upon regulated emissions per unit of energy produced.”

– The “70 percent” baseline is from 1970 and only refers to air pollutants covered by the Clean Air Act, not water and land pollution or greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide.

– Because coal use has more than tripled since 1970, total pollution from coal plants has increased. In fact, in 2004 the Clean Air Task Force found coal-plant pollution “cuts short the lives of nearly 24,000 people each year.”

Velshi has now used his position to repeatedly promote coal-to-liquids technology and minimize its problems. Perhaps he wasn’t kidding when he said, “I only look clean.”

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The nation’s top climate scientists, James Hansen, has just published a general-audience article, “Tipping Point,” in “2008-2009 State of the Wild,” from Island Press. It is well worth sending to folks who don’t like all the math. His key points:

We are at the tipping point because the climate state includes large, ready positive feedbacks provided by the Arctic sea ice, the West Antarctic ice sheet, and much of Greenland’s ice….

Prior major warmings in Earth’s history, the most recent occurring 55 million years ago . . . resulted in the extinction of half or more of the species then on the planet….

In my view, special interests have undue sway with our governments and have effectively promoted minimalist actions and growth in fossil fuels, rather than making the scale of investments necessary.

You might also like this figure on “cumulative fossil fuel carbon dioxide emissions by different countries as a percent of global total”:

China has a long way to go to catch up to this country — let alone the entire industrialized world — on cumulative emissions (though they are obviously trying as hard as they can).

The showdown in Kansas over two proposed coal-fired power plants continues to escalate such that any gamer or game theorist could be entertained for days on end.

After Secretary Rod Bremby rejected the coal plants’ permits, Governor Kathleen Sebelius has twice vetoed legislation attempting to leapfrog Sec. Bremby’s decision. A few weeks ago, the Kansas legislature came one vote short of overriding Sebelius’ veto. And the battle rages on.

The Kansas legislature is likely to try to override again. If they manage, Kansas Lieutenant Governor Mark Parkinson has begun to discuss the Administration’s willingness to take legal action.

The past few months Gov. Sebelius has been clear about her terms of acceptance for legislation. Accompanying her veto, she offered a compromise:

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This weekend, CNN’s senior business correspondent Ali Velshi devoted his “Your Money” show to rising gas prices. In one segment, he introduced an interview with Pat Davies, the CEO of the South African energy company Sasol:

Any way you slice it, prices at the pump are high, even if you stick with the regular gas. One innovative energy company based in South Africa thinks it has a workable solution. For decades it’s been turning coal and natural gas into gasoline.

In reality, Sasol’s coal-to-liquids (CTL) technology is neither “workable” nor a “solution” to high gas prices. In the interview, Davies modestly admitted that there’s a global warming problem, saying “We need to do some more work.” The truth is liquid coal is a climate killer. The energy required to convert coal to liquid fuel doubles the amount of carbon dioxide released compared to petroleum-based gasoline, producing a ton of carbon dioxide for each barrel of liquid fuel. The New York Times shows how liquid coal is the worst of all possible alternative fuels:

Furthermore, Velshi concludes his piece by debunking the claim that CTL is a “workable solution” to the rising cost of gasoline:

This is not about lowering the cost necessarily of gasoline, it is about creating alternatives and particularly coal is something you don’t eat, unlike corn, which makes ethanol. Sasol is looking to open some facilities here in the United States and it’s conducting feasibility studies. So it would take years before the first coal-to-gasoline fuel could possibly enter the U.S. market.

Watch it:

In fact, the only benefits would accrue to the coal industry, who paid CNN millions to sponsor their presidential debates, and companies like Sasol, who paid lobbyists $400,000 last year to promote their technologies.

Extended drought certainly leads to behavior change — and it’s one of the likeliest impacts of human-caused global warming.

Since “Australia today = U.S. southwest by 2050” — let’s go down under to see our future in the making. The BBC News has a good article on “The children at Wattle Park primary school [who] have only ever known drought” [see pretty but parched kids in picture on right].

What is life like for these kids?

When they wake up they use timers to take two minute showers, and collect the water in buckets so it can be re-used in the garden.

At school they have “scarecrow monitors” whose job it is to oversee the filling of more buckets from under the drinking taps to water the school vegetable patch.

Their teacher, Randall Simons, says every drop is now watched carefully, at school and at home.

Sounds like something out of Frank Herbert’s classic, Dune. The Aussie kids have lived through ten years of drought, learning:

“Water is precious and we’ve got to realise that water’s not always there. You need to save it,” says Sonia, a pupil at Wattle Park Primary School in Melbourne.

This restriction would be the real toughie for Americans:

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The good news: The earth’s carbon cycle has natural negative feedbacks that reverse natural surges in carbon dioxide.

The bad news: We are spewing CO2 into the atmosphere 14,000 times faster than nature has over the past 600,000 years, far too quickly for those feedbacks to respond.

This comes from “Close mass balance of long-term carbon fluxes from ice-core CO2 and ocean chemistry records,” in Nature Geosciences (subs. reqd, news article here) by Zeebe and Caldeira. Put another way:

“These feedbacks operate so slowly that they will not help us in terms of climate change … that we’re going to see in the next several hundred years,” Zeebe said by telephone from the University of Hawaii. “Right now we have put the system entirely out of equilibrium.“

Zeebe notes that, “the average change in the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide over the last 600,000 years has been just 22 parts per million by volume.” Humans have run up CO2 levels 100 ppm over the last two centuries!

In the ancient past, excess carbon dioxide came mostly from volcanoes, which spewed very little of the chemical compared to what humans activities do now, but it still had to be addressed.

This antique excess carbon dioxide — a powerful greenhouse gas — was removed from the atmosphere through the weathering of mountains, which take in the chemical….

The natural mechanism will eventually absorb the excess carbon dioxide, Zeebe said, but not for hundreds of thousands of years.

See, the skeptics were right: The planet is self-healing. You go, deniers [no, seriously, please, just go]! So my great-great-great-great — [insert 10,000 "greats" here] — great-great-great grand-kid will be doing just fine, thank you very much!

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