Joe Nocera gets teh stupids for Summit Power

I swear, every time Joe Nocera writes about climate change issues, he gets stupider:. And yes, he's probably topped his Keystone XL howlers with this paean to Summit Power and its proposed carbon capture coal-fired power plant near Odessa.

He gets two things wrong: Laura Miller and the "greenness" of the plant.

On Laura Miller, anybody who lived in Dallas for any length of time around the start of this century knows that the Laura Miller Nocera idolizes died, oh, about the time she decided to leave the Dallas Observer and run for mayor of Dallas. By the time her mayoral tenure ended, she had become a caricature of the politicians at Dallas City Hall she used to skewer.

On Summit, if it really were that green, since China is building so many plants from the ground up, don't you think it would? (I have lived in Odessa as well as the Metroplex, therefore I know well both hales of Nocera's wrongness.)

Or, if it's actually relatively energy efficient, ditto on China, since as JoePa says, it's worried about growth above all else.

So, either it's not that green, or carbon capture on coal sucks up a fair bit of energy.

That dichotomy doesn't exclude that a carbon-capture plant, at least with coal, actually could have problems on both sides of the street.

And, for those who know the reality of Summit, such appears to be the case.

But because Tricky Ricky Perry and others are in love with coal, still ... including Texas' dirty lignite, Summit, unlike the AEP-proposed plant in Illinois, will probably stick it to somebody somewhere on pricing.

Finally, while CO2 can indeed enhance oil recovery, we still have little guarantee about how long it will stay in the ground.

I mean, Joe Nocera knows not one fucking thing about the reality of this issue. Not one fucking thing.