Dialog on Coal as an Energy Source

Frequent commenter MarcoPolo makes two interesting points in his recent post:

1) It’s hypocritical for some Americans to smugly claim a moral victory for less U.S. emissions, while exporting emissions-creating industries overseas, while as customers, re-importing the manufactured products of those high emissions industries, using borrowed money.

2) Coal was an efficient technology to produce energy until disposal of its waste products became apparent. The cost of dealing with the waste and difficulty of extraction has slowly rendered coal less economic.

He’s right about his first point, though it’s unclear why he would use the word “smugly.”  Many Americans don’t care about emissions, and most of the remainder don’t understand the point he’s making here, i.e., that constructing economic barriers around emissions here, e.g., a carbon tax, only forces the offshoring of manufacturing to places like China and other Asians countries where the products we consume are made with far dirtier energy than the worst of what we have available here.

Would that it weren’t true, but his second statement is completely incorrect.  To our shame, we Americans have no process by which to measure the externalities of burning coal with any real accuracy, and, even if we did, we would still be powerless, due to the politic surrounding fossil fuels, to incorporate that information into our decision-making processes re: energy sources.  As a result, coal remains the least cost source of baseload electricity, which is why we continue to extract it and burn it.