Coal is a four-letter word

In Australia, a poll commissioned by Greenpeace has shown the vast majority of Australians want the government to invest profits from an emissions trading scheme in renewable energy and not the coal industry.

In Poland, Dow Jones is reporting that, despite a hefty increase in coal prices, Polish power generators are having trouble securing deliveries for the fourth quarter, setting the stage for prices to rise further and raising the prospect of disruptions to the country's power supply.

And in the US, Al Gore last week issued a call to arms against coal. Speaking on on a celebrity panel in New York, the Nobel Prize-winning former vice president said: "If you're a young person looking at the future of this planet and looking at what is being done right now, and not done, I believe we have reached the stage where it is time for civil disobedience to prevent the construction of new coal plants that do not have carbon capture and sequestration," reports the Wall Street Journal.
And while this might seem a bit extreme, it seems "Mr Gore's brand of anticoal radicalism is quickly becoming the liberal consensus", says the WSJ.

"The greens loathe coal because of greenhouse gases – and have succeeded in making new coal plants nearly impossible to build," says the paper. "More than 60 have been cancelled in the last year alone. Democratic Governor Kathleen Sebelius is waging a high-profile campaign against new coal plants in Kansas, and only last week Joe Biden seemed to endorse a coal ban."

Then there is NASA scientist and "influential global warming swami" James Hansen, who recently testified on behalf of the six Greenpeace activists who caused £30,000 of criminal damage in an attempt to shut down an English coal utility, says the paper. "Hansen argued they had a 'lawful excuse' because of the imminence of climate doom; they were acquitted."

On the slightly less negative side, Professor Victor Rudolph, a clean coal researcher at the University of Queensland, told the Coal Tech 2008 conference in Brisbane this week that the technology for clean coal was feasible, but its introduction was taking too long, reports The Canberra Times.

"Carbon capture and storage has to be done much more quickly than people are talking about at the moment," Professor Rudolph said.

"The timeline one is seeing is sort of five years for research and five years to do demonstration and then start implementing at the end of 10 years. I think it's got to be done and dusted in 10 years."

"If it's not done in that sort of timeframe, or at least gone a long way, (coal) is going to be overtaken, people will vote with their feet, and there are going to be other solutions, he said, citing alternatives including wind, tidal, geothermal and, in particular, solar.

But the Professor isn't about to give up on coal. It's "such a good resource in terms of embodied chemical energy, we'd be crazy to give it up, absolutely crazy," he reassured the conference, which was largely populated by mining company reps. Indeed, he added, "the reason it's causing problems for us is it's just so good. Everybody uses coal."

And he has a point. As the WSJ points out, "China is set to build 800,000 megawatts of new coal generation over the next eight years. That's ... more than two-and-a-half times the size of America's total installed coal capacity."

Meanwhile, says the Times, a small group of protesters voiced their opposition to the coal industry outside the Brisbane conference.