Perhaps misinterpreting our earlier post, President Obama named these "clean" technologies as critical to ensuring American competitiveness and recovery from abysmal employment levels (minute 23 of yesterday's state of the union address):
- Nuclear
- Clean Coal, i.e. Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS), i.e. finding somewhere other than the atmosphere to dump CO2
- Opening new areas for off-shore oil & gas development
- Biofuels
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has provided estimates of air emissions from various CCS plant designs. While CO2 is drastically reduced (though never completely captured), emissions of air pollutants increase significantly, generally due to the energy penalty of capture. Some proposals suggest dumping carbon masses deep into the oceans, exacerbating the problem of ocean acidification, which is due to anthropogenic carbon being in the atmosphere in the first place.
US biofuel production is predominantly corn-based ethanol, which raises numerous concerns regarding pollution, net generation of greenhouse gases, and food security. Internationally, deforestation - especially of biodiversity-rich forests in South America and South East Asia - is also a major concern.
Not exactly what environmentalists were hoping for.
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