Tuesday, September 08, 2009
Today's News: More than half of the electricity generated in the US comes from coal and yet it's a huge part of our environmental crisis. What to do about it? The FutureGen project is set to build a coal fueled, near zero emissions power plant in Illinois. This initiative is a government/industry partnership. The Dept of Energy anticipates an initial financial contribution of $1.073 billion dollars to the program. The only problem is that this project plans to capture the CO2 the coal extraction process emits into the atmosphere and instead, trap it in the Earth. That's sort of like taking our garbage dumps, spreading dirt over them, building houses on them and finding that 20 years later, children are dying of toxic materials seeping from the playgrounds. Yet another bumble head idea? Or a valuable solution to our environmental crisis? You decide.