The Asia-Pacific climate summit

The big Asia-Pacific climate summit ended today, and I suppose I should have something to say about it. Amanda’s piece on the Asia-Pacific climate pact lays out the basics, and I said a little more here. Thankfully, Ross Gelbspan has saved me the trouble of repeating myself, with this compact and devastating post about the summit. As he says, the whole pact is basically an attempt to subsidize the further use of coal. Clean coal technology, with its reliance on hugely expensive geo-engineering projects like mechanical carbon sequestration, basically represents a full-employment act for companies like Bechtel and Halliburton. These projects are also wasteful in the extreme. Given their huge pricetags, the same amount of money would generate far more electricity per dollar were it to be spent on constructing windfarms. A real “pro-technology pro-growth” initiative would center on a worldwide project to replace every coal-burning generating plant, every oil-burning furnace, every gasoline-powered car with clean, climate-friendly energy technologies. Yup.