Articles

NRDC’s Hawkins Defends Obama’s CCS Taskforce

2010-02-19

Washington (CERR) Feb. 19, 2010 - David Hawkins, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s climate center, defended the creation of President Obama’s task force for a carbon capture and storage (CCS) strategy against a hit from David Sassoon, environmentalist and founder of Science First and the SolveClimate website.

Sassoon argued that CCS and the task force is nothing more than a political and misguided move to appease coal interests at the expense of investment in renewables.

Hawkins took Sassoon’s blog to task by asking whether it’s better to leave the door open to new coal plants with no controls on carbon dioxide, or leaving it open only to coal plants with CCS.

“Right now, the coal industry uses the claim that CCS is not ready as a weapon to fight mandatory CO2 requirements. Those of us who talk to members of Congress know that these claims are influential in far too many offices. The Obama CCS task force is a way to take that argument away from the coal industry,” Hawkins said.

“What CCS will do, in addition to cutting carbon pollution, is to internalize one cost of coal use that is currently ignored. That is a huge step forward in ending the distorted market that has allowed coal to dominate electricity production until now.

“A policy requiring new coal plants to use CCS dramatically improves the economic competitiveness of cleaner alternatives overnight. It is true that CCS will not stop MTR; neither will SO2 scrubbers, NOx controls, mercury controls, or baghouses. But that has never caused us to oppose those vital life-saving control measures in the past.”

Read David Hawkins blog post: “CCS: a piece of the puzzle”

Read David Sassoon’s blog post: “The Making of a Clean Coal President”