Clean coal: Unworkable, expensive, but blessed with stimulus money

Big coal's last best hope, carbon capture and sequestration (CCS), which is the missing puzzle piece required to create a truly 'clean coal' energy plant, is dead.

The death of CCS, which has not been greatly exaggerated (see here, and here), hasn't prevented the Obama Administration from recently allocating money to stimulate it back to life -- for instance, in field tests, like this one that began last week in an unused West Virginia mine shaft. And it hasn't prevented climate scientist James Hanson from naming CCS as one of many possible solutions to the problem of global warming.