A livable climate can (probably) survive the burning of almost all of the world’s conventional oil and gas — but not if we also burn even half the coal (see here and figure below).

So the top priority for any climate policy must be to stop the building of traditional coal plants — which is why that has become the top priority of NASA’s James Hansen (see here). The next priority is to replace existing coal plants with carbon free power, which could include coal with carbon capture and storage (CCS), as fast as possible. And that means a related priority is to encourage the introduction of CCS as quickly as possible, to see if that is a viable large-scale solution.

A climate policy that does not start by achieving at least the first goal, a moratorium on coal without CCS, must be labeled a failure. By that measure, the cap and trade system currently being employed by the Europeans looks to be a failure, as we’ll see.

So that means the first major climate policy we should adopt is not a cap & trade, but

Requiring all new coal power plants to meet an “emission performance” standard that limits CO2 emissions to levels achievable with CCS systems.

This is the 2007 recommendation of Ken Berlin and Robert M. Sussman in a Center for American Progress Report, Global Warming and the Future of Coal: The Path to Carbon Capture and Storage (summary here). It is also the goal of a bill introduced last month by Waxman and Markey, “Moratorium on Uncontrolled Power Plants Act” (see here).

[Yes, regular readers will note that this does represent a bit of a shift in my thinking -- I once thought the most urgent climate policy was getting a price for carbon dioxide -- but the recent news from Europe about the possible resurgence of coal power should change everyone's thinking.]

NYT: “Despite Climate Worry, Europe Turns to Coal“

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So an industry CEO tells E&E News (here) that nuclear is the only non-carbon baseload power [not!] and that therefore nuclear is our only future and since the United States does such a great job of dealing with low-level radioactive waste, we should become the world’s repository.

That would be the logic of one Steve Creamer, CEO of EnergySolutions, “a full-service nuclear fuel cycle company” [in contrast to all of those "partial-service nuclear fuel cycle companies," sometimes called electric utilities]. One of his website’s many warm-hearted front-page images is above (more here).

Why shouldn’t we take the world’s low-level radioactive waste, says Creamer, other countries take our recycled computers [!!], so it’s the perfect division of global labor:

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The Washington Post has a story on several communities in the U.S. that are including climate impact in their decision making. This is welcome news indeed. The story looks at King county in Washington applying emissions tests to public works projects, Massachusetts developer disclosure laws, and California’s attorney general suing companies for increasing emissions. The article goes on to point the finger at sprawl as something that must be reigned in, saying:

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