New West Network

A CHANGE IN THE AIR ON CLIMATE AND COAL?

What Are The Tipping Points For US-China Climate And Coal Policy?

By Todd Wilkinson, 11-24-06

	Former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State John Turner toasts the vice governor of Shanxi Province in China after a memorandum of agreement was signed to helped foster the application of clean coal technology in the U.S. and China. Wyoming native son Turner, who was known as the "greenest" member of the Bush Administration while serving under Secretary of State Colin Powell, also was the national director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service under President George H.W. Bush. Today, he is a board member of Peabody Coal and is a major advocate of IGCC technology, seeing it as an important step in addressing climate change. Looking on is Rob Wallace, a senior executive with General Electric. Photos by Todd Wilkinson.

Seventeen years ago, when Secretary of State James Baker and Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze met in a rustic building near the shore of Jackson Lake in Grand Teton National Park, Wyo., the diplomatic session by itself, of course, did not trigger the end of the Cold War.

The stage for a melting of frigid tension between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. had been set by earlier subtle--and not so subtle--events.

But the timing and place of the meeting most Americans don't remember were credited afterward with inspiring these representatives of two global superpowers to dramatically alter the dangerous paradigm in which both nations approached a nuclear-armed world. They carried the spirit of cooperation, with the Tetons behind them, back to Washington, D.C. and Moscow.

It is this same strategy that David Wendt, president of the Jackson Hole Center for Global Affairs, has courted in sending influential players from the coal-bearing region of Wyoming and Montana to the equivalent in China and, in turn, hosting Chinese officials in this corner of the American West.

If, as writer Malcolm Gladwell suggests in his book The Tipping Point, that it's often the intervention of certain people at critical moments in history that make a difference in changing public consciousnesses, small deeds can add up to a cascade of unexpected consequences.

With the United Nations recently concluding its global summit on climate change in Nairobi, most governments on Earth—bolstered in their conclusions by the mountain of scientific evidence documenting human-caused changes in the atmosphere, oceans, and land from the Arctic North to the Amazon Basin—are moving toward action: Action that is more sophisticated, cooperative, and pragmatic than that layed out in the Kyoto Protocol more than a decade ago. Will the United States, China, and Australia join the rest of the world, engaging in a meaningful policy strategy not because Al Gore says so, but because it can no longer be ignored with even major industry conceding that changes must be made?

Word on the street these days in Washington is that the Bush Administration is about to dramatically reverse course from its obstinate position on climate change and soon will unveil a strategy to address U.S. carbon dioxide emissions into Earth's atmosphere. Suddenly, the talk of clean coal technology in Wyoming and Montana has, thanks in part to a group of local diplomats, become recognized on the international stage.

It would be welcomed internationally as a quantum leap forward. After all, should it be true, humanity 50 years from today will not look back and deride this Administration for dragging its feet on climate if, in fact President Bush and Vice President Cheney--whose public identities remain synonymous with the Big Oil interests--dedicate the U.S. to being a catalyst.

One of the biggest areas where an immediate difference can be made with confronting CO2 emissions at the source is in transforming the way electricity is generated in the two largest economies on the planet.

The Jackson Hole Center for Global Affairs recently went to China again and promoted a process of turning coal into electricity called "integrated gasification combined cycle" or IGCC for short.

You're going to be hearing a lot more about IGCC technology for it represents a radical improvement—indeed a paradigm shift—in power generation and it could re-position coal-rich Wyoming, Montana, and the Shanxi Province of China at the forefront of a lucrative revolution in clean energy.

Some remain skeptical of the promise of IGCC. Last week in Helena, Montana, environmentalists found themselves in a spirited debate with the Montana Environmental Information Center (MEIC) saying that making coal-fired plants "cleaner" and more climate friendly is unproven, particularly the ability to capture carbon dioxide and then, theoretically, inject it into the ground where it is safely sequestered.

	History recognizes the cultural wisdom and technological advances of ancient Chinese civilization but in an age of climate change, old fortifications, once providing the comfort of isolated protection, no longer suffice. On what was a bright sunny day, a thick sulpherous fog hangs in the air over Pinyao City, a World Heritage Site in the Shanxi Province. The huge amounts of carbon dioxide pouring into the atmosphere from coal and coke plants in Shanxi are having worldwide effects, even melting glaciers on the other side of the world in the Northern Rockies.

However, two other groups, the Powder River Basin Resource Council based in Sheridan, Wyoming and the Northern Plains Resource Council, headquartered in Billlings, each of which have significant memberships of rural ranchers and have served as watchdogs on the coal industry, are more open-minded.

Jill Morrison of PRBRC and Mark Fix, chairman of NPRC both would like to see the deployment of more wind, solar, and grain-based alternative energy. But the capacity for alternative energy is years away from being viable on a large scale and, in the meantime, they argue that employing the state-of-the-art technology with coal today achieves gains with new permitted plants and possibly in replacing old, dirtier facilities. Plus, the hope is that it could make coal production more sensitive to neighboring landowners downwind.

Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer agrees and this puts him exactly in line with the thinking of Wendt and prominent Wyomingites, including State Senate President Grant Larson, former U.S. deputy Secretary of State John F. Turner, current U.S. Sen. Craig Thomas, and Gov. Dave Freudenthal.

What's right, as far as the best applied technology for the U.S. in delivering economic and environmental benefits, is also right for China, where provincial and national representatives of the People's Republic have warmed to ideas of joint cooperation, with multi-national giants like General Electric serving as a conduit.

As China itself opens to more foreign investment and state-run industry shifts to privately owned companies and a market economy, government leaders have demonstrated, time and again, that they do not make decisions impetuously.

The Chinese have shown themselves to be savvy and methodical when dealing with foreign entities, Wendt says. "Their relationships are cultivated through mutual trust that can only be established over time," he adds, referring to the ongoing discussions between Shanxi officials and Wyoming leaders. "They can take years to mature. We're finally seeing the fruits of that process. One thing about the Chinese is that when they decide to act, because decisions effecting the country are centrally controlled, it can have huge immediate repercussions."

This autumn, NASA and its renowned expert on climate James Hansen announced that the last three decades were among the warmest known to exist on Earth in the last million years—the result of human-caused emissions creating a greenhouse effect in the atmosphere. Reams of more peer-reviewed scientific affirmation continue to pour in.

Any hope of curbing CO2 emissions and thus staving off the most extreme impacts of climate change globally cannot exist without addressing coal-fired power plants in China where 500 are scheduled to come on line and an urgent need exists to replace other facilities that are functionally Draconian.

At the same time, there is no better incentive more convincing for the Chinese than first seeing the Americans mandate state-of-the art coal plants on U.S. soil, which could cement a partnership in new technology.

According to Jeff Goodell, author of the critically-acclaimed book "Big Coal: The Dirty Secret Behind America's Energy Future," the U.S. alone currenty burns more than a billion tons of coal a year. Some 40 percent of total U.S. carbon dioxide emissions come from coal-fired smokestacks. And with an estimated 1 trillion tons of recoverable coal, it will remain a central and necessary fuel for generations to come.

Taiyuan in the Shanxi Province is a Chicago-sized city and as native Wyomingite Rob Wallace of GE described it, "the Gillette of China"--but it is a sooty example of how poorly planned energy development, using old 19th century technology, can have disastrous results.

The day we arrived in September, a few coal miners died in another accident (among thousands who have perished working in coal mines) and pollution, which is visible from satellites in space, cast a thick, gloomy presence in the sky. Every year, millions of people in China are treated for respiratory distress caused by bad air quality.

The Chinese are not callous, and as Turner and Larson say, they demonstrated a sincerity in working with the U.S. to find better ways of generating power that can propel the economy along and not harm its 1.3 billion inhabitants or the atmosphere.

Among those who attended the Clean Coal Forum in Taiyuan were top government officials in China, staffers with the Natural Resources Defense Council's China office (which is recognized as a respected conservation organization by the Chinese government) and by industry, including General Electric-China. In the U.S., GE operates a prototype IGCC facility in Tampa, Fla.

It may be hard to believe, but the efforts of the Jackson Hole Center have caught the attention of the Bush-Cheney State Department.

Another indication of Jackson Hole's role in nearing a cultural tipping point is the interest from Senator Thomas, who has introduced legislation that would establish an IGCC plant on the high plains and enable the electricity to be "exported" to states downline such as California. Many observers say that, at present, Wyoming and Montana, function like Third World natural resource colonies in which coal is extracted but the states and its citizens derive few of the benefits.

	With the world coming to Beijing in 2008 for the Summer Olympic Games and the curtain that veiled its environmental problems being pulled away, the Chinese government, experts say, is now, more than ever, in a position to consider actions on climate change. More specifically, the focus is on the burning of coal, the major fuel for its booming economy. Here in the Forbidden City, old China is finding a new place in discussions that have a resonance in the American West.

Thomas sees economic opportunities following in the wake of California, through the insistence of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, enacting regulations that aim to reduce the state's carbon emissions and establish a carbon trading system.

A day after Wendt, Turner and Larson returned from China, Thomas joined Senator Dianne Feinstein in pushing for a study on how a 200 megawatt IGCC power plant could be erected in Wyoming "that can also sequester carbon dioxide emissions" and sell power to California.

Imagine: Craig Thomas the Republican joining Dianne Feinstein the Democrat in a green power project that involves CARBON SEQUESTRATION? This line of thinking positions Thomas light years ahead of his Republican Senate colleague James Inhofe, who infamously declared that global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people. Science, and the fact that industry is distancing itself from Inhofe, shows that the discussion has passed him by.

Could the Bush Administration, influenced mightily by Vice President Cheney who is an old friend of John Turner, be readying to move the U.S. to the front and center and could IGCC facilities in Shanxi and Wyoming-Montana become a tool for engendering goodwill between Washington and Beijing? Building IGCC plants are not cheap but the dividends they bring, experts say, are worth the investment. They can cost between $500 million and $1 billion but the costs of construction would come down dramatically as more are ordered. Experts say that if the same hundreds of billions of tax dollars, or even a smaller fraction of it, spent waging war in Iraq, had been directed to fostering a partnership with industry and accelerating the implementation of IGCC plants and evolving them, tremendous gains would already be set in motion. A byproduct, ironically, would have been greater energy security here on the homefront.

One earthshaking idea that grew out of the Chinese talks with the Jackson Hole delegation is creating twin, leading-edge IGCC power plants—one located in the Powder River Basin and the other in Shanxi Province that would be fully operational and used as learning laboratories intended to produce cleaner air, increase power capacity with less coal, reduce CO2, and capture other pollutants such as mercury, sulfur, and other toxic byproducts of coal production.

An added benefit is that these prototypes could be licensed by private companies like GE, become the model for new plants, and transform the way that power is generation. That is the vision, at least, that Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer is buying into as he uses his political clout to push for the state's first IGCC facility.

As Gladwell notes in The Tipping Point, once accepted ideas go viral and become adopted in an epidemiological sense, there is no stopping them. All that Wyoming and IGCC needs now, says Wendt, is a champion in Washington.

Once upon a time, George H.W. Bush, the current president's father, used the Tetons as a backdrop to re-double the nation's commitment to improve air quality in America. It wasn't far from the rustic meeting room where Secretary of State Baker and Soviet Foreign Minister Shevardnadze gathered.

Back then, John F. Turner, a college-trained biologist with a speciality in bald eagles, was serving as Bush the elder's national director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Will Bush's son return to the Tetons for an encore performance but with an issue global in scale that will affect human life for centuries to come?

A world worth saving can be seen clearly in the majesty of the Tetons as well as its glacial snowpack that is now in serious retreat. It's also visible in Shanxi, whose cultural sites are cradles of ancient Chinese civilization and wisdom, Wendt says.

While most Americans may never glimpse Shanxi or smell its current bad air or taste it or wheeze from it, and they may not know of the extent of human misery caused from its pollution, there in the melting glaciers they have a connection to scientific cause and effect.

Coal, writes author Jeff Goodell, must be looked upon not as an alternative to oil and gas but a transition fuel, a stepping stone, to true, clean, low-carbon energy.

"We should be grateful for the vast reserves of coal we have left and use them wisely," he says, "but it's important to recognize that our bounty of coal is not going to save us from anything. At best, exploiting our coal reserves will buy us a decade or two of time and come at enormous expense, both in terms of the environment and public health and in terms of the billions of dollars that will be invested in a fuel source that is, at best, a short-term solution."

Without maximizing the potential gains from cleaner coal technology, resorting to coal based on the old paradigm is going to exacerbate problems. "Clean" coal is not a panacea; it's simply better than the method of making electricity given to us by our great great grandparents. "In reality, facing the twin challenges of the end of oil and the coming of global warming is going to require reinventing the infrastructure of modern life," Goodell says. "The most dangerous aspect of our continued dependence on coal is not what it does to our lungs, our mountains, or even climate, but what it does to our minds: it preserves the illusion that we don't have to change our thinking."

EDITOR'S NOTE: This is the second in an ongoing series of articles about clean coal technology (read the first article here), the role that Wyoming and Montana are playing in international discussions about climate change, and opportunities for industry in the U.S. and China to become leaders in changing the paradigm of how electricity is produced using a natural resource that is both abundant and troublesome. This fall, New West contributing editor Todd Wilkinson traveled to China along with a delegation of officials from Wyoming and Montana to participate in the groundbreaking U.S.-China Clean Coal Forum. Wilkinson is currently writing a book about the environmental work of philanthropist and media pioneer Ted Turner who founded the Energy Future Coalition, one of the leading promoters of clean, alternative energy in the country.

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