Energy, Emissions, and Action - Beyond Smoke and Mirrors - page 112

carbon-free or low-carbon energy sources. We can start
this move in several ways: substituting natural gas for coal
(the reduced carbon path); or substituting sources that
have no carbon like wind or nuclear power for fossil fuels
(the carbon-free energy path); or capturing and putting
away the emissions from fossil fuels (called carbon capture
and sequestration or CCS), which is the hope of the coal
industry; or doing the same thing with less energy (the
increased ef ciency path). Carbon-free energy is already

available on a large scale from hydroelectric and nuclear
power plants (life-cycle emissions including those from
plant construction are shown in Chapter ). Wind and

solar power, though still small, are beginning to have
signi cant market penetration. Substitute a solar-energy

electricity power plant for a coal-

red plant and emissions
go down. Unfortunately, things are never as simple as we
would like. The sun doesn ' t shine at night and the wind

doesn t blow all the time. As of now we have no good way

to store electricity made from these intermittent sources,
so they cannot do the job alone. What we can and cannot
do in the near term is discussed in later chapters on all the
energy technologies.

'

. No Silver Bullets

In folklore the silver bullet can slay a monster, vampire, or
were-wolf. The consequences of a major temperature
increase from greenhouse gas emissions certainly qualify as
an evil monster because of the effects on our civilization. Sea
level will rise, tropical diseases will move north in the
Northern Hemisphere and south in the Southern, crop