Yes, and you've given me an opportunity to plug my last book, which was called Sustainable fossil fuels: the unusual suspect in the quest for clean and enduring energy, which won the Donner Prize last year as the top policy book in the country. In that book, I look at all energy sources, large renewables, traditional ones like hydro power, the newer renewables that we're looking at, nuclear power, and I look at how you could use fossil fuels, coal, oil, and natural gas, without having greenhouse gas emissions.
Over the years we have pointed the gun at the fossil fuel industry, and let's say the coal industry in particular, by saying we didn't want the amount of particulates coming out of coal plants or we didn't want the amount of acid emissions coming out of coal plants. So the regulatory hurdles for the coal industry have changed over time, and I think with each one of those hurdles, as they've developed the technologies to respond to society's demands, they've called that clean coal.
The definition of the words “clean coal”, if you look at it historically, has actually changed over time. Fifteen or ten years ago, the coal industry, when it referred to clean coal, meant a coal plant that would have captured most, certainly the sulphur dioxide emissions, so we're really talking about the emissions that cause acid rain. Then, of course, the goalposts shifted on them, and globally and nationally we've said to the coal industry, if you still want to burn coal, now we're worried about greenhouse gases as well, so you have to worry about carbon dioxide, for example, in particular.
Then we looked around—and that's the research I did for my book, and it's work that I'm doing internationally with experts around the world—and realized that there are actually configurations of technologies where you can either capture the carbon dioxide straight from the smokestack or you can gasify coal and create a synthesis gas, which you can separate eventually into a hydrogen-rich stream and basically a pure carbon dioxide stream. You can capture the carbon dioxide, ship it by pipeline, and, for example, inject it into the earth as a way of permanent storage. So that's evolved to become the definition of clean coal.
Again, it's a very simple mathematical proposition. If you at all agree that we should take seriously what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change tells us, in terms of where greenhouse gas emissions should be 43 years from now in 2050, you can't keep building coal plants that emit greenhouse gases around the planet, and yet we are. Certainly, the developing countries are, but so are the rich developed countries.
I was on a group called the China Council, which was advising the senior Chinese policy-makers throughout the nineties up until a few years ago, and it was quite clear that the Chinese weren't going to go anywhere as long as the rich countries weren't doing this as well.
That's what I talked about in my introductory remarks. If I run out the numbers here, I see that we can't be building in North America—so that's the United States and Canada—coal plants that still emit greenhouse gases. We won't get to those 2050 targets. I'm saying that with almost 90% certainty.