THANKS in no small part to Al Gore and his film producers, the American public is waking up to the seriousness of global warming. What is not so widely appreciated is that unless the US government acts urgently and decisively, this problem could very quickly get very much worse.
For reasons both economic and political, coal is poised to be the fuel of choice in the coming decades as the US weans itself off foreign oil (see “Cheap coal threat to global climate”). Coal combustion generates half the US’s electricity and releases about 1.5 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide…
