Mitigating global atmospheric CO2 increase requires that use of coal must be reduced. Current economic forecasts point to a major increase in coal burning as China and India grow their economies. According to stories in the Financial Times"Sparks fly as China's hunger for coal grows," China now uses about 3.3 billion tons of Coal every year, and this is expected to rise by a billion tons a year by 2030, with much of the increase purchased offshore.

Just to get an idea of the scale of the problem, to avoid the increase of a billion tons per year in imported coal to China would require replacing the coal power with 135 Gigawatt power facilities. It boils down to building 7 big power stations a year just to stay even, say 14 per year to make a dent.

If we build nuclear stations, the cost might be 10B each, so this could be a problem costing around 1.35 trillion. Big but not beyond consideration when you factor in the cost of continuing on the current path.

The rate of environmentally sustainable power generation construction is no where near making a dent in the growth of coal unless there is a major boost to this mode of power generation supported by flows of capital on the order of that now going to Coal.

The capital markets see the construction of facilities that can process hundreds of millions of tons of coal a year and major capital committed to distribution system improvements.

If climate change is to be mitigated by reducing CO2 in the atmosphere, time is short, and the capital that is now going into creating a coal flow from the ground into the atmosphere must be redirected to creating the new energy infrastructure.

Some incremental progress is being made with the development of wind power, but this has not been part of an integrated transmission/system operation/investment/WindGeneration program. Creation of a large scale program that would include the above along with research and an educational outreach program is an opportunity for government to help us work in a common, effective manner to implement prudent measures that would bring our economy into balance with the environment, and reduce dramatically our reliance on foreign oil and coal supplies.

The process of creating a new viable energy supply source capable of running a country sustainably has a time scale of decades which is unfortunately the same time scale for us to control CO2 emissions if we are to mitigate the heating now underway to a level below that which produces catastrophic consequences to our civilization.