According to Ken Ward Jr. at the Charleston Gazette, President Obama has announced his plans to speed up carbon capture and sequestration -- aka CCS, or more commonly by the wildly inappropriately named 'clean coal'. 

Here's the funny thing. I drove from Colorado to Illinois recently, and was super happy to notice a bunch of wind farms along the way. What I didn't notice was coal-burning power plants who captured their carbon and sequestered it. 

Because it doesn't exist. It's a theory. 

And the theory is, 'let's take the CO2 released during the burning of coal, and PUT IT IN THE GROUND'. So the technology doesn't exists to do it, but also, we don't know if 'putting it in the ground' will work in any conceivable way. 

We've done such a good job with trash and nuclear waste, I can't see how we'd go wrong! 

The part that truly chafes me is President Obama is ordering Energy Secretary Chu and EPA Administrator Jackson to "[figure] out how we can deploy affordable clean coal technology on a widespread scale within 10 years". 

Ten years from now, President Obama will be former President Obama writing his memoirs. Meanwhile, we'll be stuck with an non-operational clean coal system. 

I believe that President Obama has to stop attempting to serve both masters. By winging into Copehagen and brokering a "non-binding treaty" and then meeting with top coal guys to tell them "let's have CCS in ten years" he's sending pretty mixed messages. 

If we're going to stop global warming, we have to stop burning coal. It's that simple, but President Obama needs to pick a path and walk the walk.