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By Root 1094 0

pilot demonstrations are one thing, but a demonstration of CCS at the scale of even one full-sized power plant has yet to be attempted. FutureGen, the only proposed prototype, was scrapped in 2008 when its estimated cost swelled to $1.8 billion (the project has since been revived). Finally, there are no guarantees that the stuff won’t leak back out to the atmosphere. A leakage rate of just 1% per year would lead to 63% of the stored carbon dioxide being released within a century, undoing much of the supposed environmental benefit.180

Carbon Capture and Storage has become a commonly accepted bullet point among proponents of coal, as if all of the above problems have somehow been worked out. Politicians and many scientists have dutifully lined up behind it. It figures prominently in all of our biggest blueprints for reducing greenhouse gases, including model scenarios of the Stern Report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and the International Energy Agency projections outlined above. CCS is embraced by Barack Obama, Angela Merkel, Gordon Brown, and other leaders of the G8. It is the single strand of hope upon which a thunderous increase in carbon emissions from our coming coal boom might possibly be restrained.

I’m not holding my breath.

CHAPTER 4

California Browning, Shanghai Drowning

“Behold, he withholdeth the waters, and they dry up: also he sendeth them out, and they overturn the earth.”

—Job 12:15

In January 2008, the U.S. state of Iowa was on the front pages of newspapers all around the world. Ninety-four thousand voters of the Iowa Democratic Party had just propelled Barack Obama—a freshman Illinois senator who was virtually unknown just two years earlier—over the longtime national front-runner, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York. The Iowa caucuses are the first major electoral event in the U.S. presidential race and are widely believed to influence its outcome. Iowa’s voters had delivered a stunning upset and the opening salvo of one of the most exciting and protracted primary battles in U.S. electoral history. Little did they know that only five months later, their state would be on the front pages of newspapers around the world once again.

Within weeks after the political campaigns had left for other battles in other states, the snow started to fall. Two big storms dumped more than three feet of it around the little town of Oskaloosa. By March, Iowa had tied its third-highest monthly snowfall total in 121 years of record keeping. Then came the rain. April’s statewide average was the second-highest in 136 years. Twelve inches deluged the town of Fayette, obliterating its previous record of eight inches set back in 1909.181 Snowmelt and water ran everywhere, flooding cornfields and swelling streams and rivers. On May 25, a category F5 tornado—the strongest category of tornado and Iowa’s first F5 in forty years—leveled a forty-mile swath through tiny Parkersburg, killing eight people, destroying hundreds of homes, and narrowly missing populous Cedar Falls. President George W. Bush declared four counties federal disaster areas and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) dispatched thirty-nine relief workers to the state.182 Forty-eight other tornados followed in the month of June, killing four Boy Scouts and raising the state’s tornado fatalities to its highest since 1968.

Then things got nasty. The wettest fifteen days in Iowa history began on May 29. Global food prices soared as farm fields in America’s top state producer of corn and soybeans melted away in the rain. In Cedar Rapids, thirteen hundred city blocks were inundated when the Cedar River leapt its banks and climbed eleven feet higher than had ever happened in the city’s 159-year existence. In Iowa City, parts of the University of Iowa campus were underwater. When I arrived in mid-July the university’s magnificent arts buildings and museum were trashed. Cedar Rapids was piled high with gutted wood, dead cars, and molding drywall. A train dangled crazily from a crushed bridge into the river. The little farming