In the subsequent nine days, the squabbling has continued, spiraling down into petty insults (more on that below). The DOE claims they put the brakes on FutureGen, shifting its funds to support only the CCS research, because of skyrocketing costs. In a letter to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Energy Secretary Bodman says:

It became clear the Department of Energy could not, in good conscience, continue to support the program. The likelihood that it would fail, leaving the American people with hundreds of millions of dollars in sunk cost and none of the benefits, is not acceptable.

Come on. The DOE's share rose from $800 million to $1.1 billion. The difference is less than what we spend per day on the Iraq war. So when the DOE says it's saving the tax payers money, comparatively, it's chump change.

We don’t have time for this. If this administration was serious about dealing with climate change, the DOE would not only keep its commitments to FutureGen but expand them to the other CCS research.

Instead, lawmakers and administrators are exchanging snipes. Illinois legislators demanded that Under Secretary of Energy C.H. “Bud” Albright apologize for “insulting the people of Mattoon and Central Illinois” when he said the DOE had no interest in “building Disneyland in some swamp in Illinois.” 

Yes, but...the Magical Kingdom's general populace doesn't care much where the thing's built, just do it fast.


**Announced by Bush in February 2003, FutureGen was a cutting edge partnership between the DOE and private business to build a commercial coal plant that would produce significantly less pollution and could also capture the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide.

That Holy Grail of technologies has two parts. The first is called the Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle (IGCC), and it breaks down coal into its basic chemical parts. Rather than burning coal, gasification uses heat, pressure, steam and air or oxygen to extract coal's useful gasses and separate out its pollutants, such as NOx, SOx, particulates, and CO2. The technology has been around since the 1980s, but is more expensive than traditional coal-fired plants so hasn’t been used much.

While IGCC can capture CO2, the technology needed to store it is called (surprisingly) carbon capture and sequestration (CCS). The goal of CCS is to put carbon dioxide underground and keep it there. A lot of questions still need answering before CCS will be any sort of solution to climate change. But FutureGen was going to try and find
some of the solutions.

Why is this important? Don't we hate any and all coal? Well, given the world's ravenous consumption of energy, we’re going to draw on our vast reserves of coal through the 21st century, so best we figure out how to do it with the least amount of environmental damage. Even your man Gore says so.