Europe's Turn Back To Coal Raises Climate Fears

At a time when the world's top climate experts agree that carbon emissions must be rapidly reduced to hold down global warming, Italy's major electricity producer, Enel, is converting its massive power plant here from oil to coal, generally the dirtiest fuel on earth.

Over the next five years, Italy will increase its reliance on coal to 33 percent from 14 percent. Power generated by Enel from coal will rise to 50 percent.

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Comments

[jsarets]

I don't understand why we insist on destroying precious geological compounds to create heat for electric generation when we have so much heat flow from the Sun and heat reserves from the Earth's mantle that we could be capturing.

The technology and economics of solar thermal capture is simple (mirrors and water loops), and combined with thermal buffers (insulated water tanks), the turbines can operate 24/7. What's the holdup? Enhanced geothermal capture is a bit tricky, but we haven't tapped many of our natural dry steam fields yet. I get 57% of my electricity from a nearby geothermal plant that can operate for thousands of years on nothing but periodic additions of recycled wastewater.

[vandegrasse]

So we're all just burning anything we can get our hands on and to hell with the climate. What a bunch of nincompoops humans are.

[Chiang]

Nuclear power.

Clean, safe, and potentially too cheap to meter.

[jubo]

Borrowed time...