Merry old soul

Strange that the organisers of the first world Coal to Liquids conference in April 08 should advertise their conference on the Climate-L News. Or perhaps not. These fuels look very likely to be almost as bad as can be when it comes to greenhouse emissions (barring, perhaps, biofuels from destroyed rainforests; it would be interesting to see a comparison).

At least we can blow yet another big fat raspberry at the peak oilers.

But before feeling smug, consider the following from an article by Alan Zarembo in the LA Times that Paul Ehrlich circulates with the comment "One of the reasons civilisation has probably had it":

Coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel, is the crack cocaine of the developing world.

..."A gigaton of carbon here, a gigaton there -- we've got a disjunction between the rhetoric and the reality," [says] David Wheeler, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development...

Leading the coal spree is China, which has more than doubled its CO2 emissions from coal since 2000 to more than 2.7 billions tons a year...more