Post Carbon Fellow Richard Heinberg went head to head with MIT’s Howard J. Herzog in the Wall Street Journal to explain why the economics of clean coal won’t work.

From the article:

For years, Americans have seen commercials touting “clean coal,” while politicians on both sides of the aisle have extolled its promise. The technology to capture carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants has been tried and tested. Yet today almost none of the nation’s coal-fueled plants are “clean.”

Why the delay? The biggest problem for “clean coal” is that the economics don’t work. Carbon capture and storage, or CCS, is extremely expensive. That gives the power industry little incentive to implement it in the absence of a substantial carbon tax.