Draft Sixth Power Plan Comment

To the NWPCC: You are to be commended for getting a start on the shift to cleaner and more sustainable energy. But it is clear that we have to do something about coal, if not in the immediate short term but for the intermediate and long term. "Clean coal" is a concept I cannot get my hands around, and although reinjection may work in some locations it is far from a universal solution. Mining it is dirty and destructive and burning it is a real global warming hazard. For the short term we need to use best technology on the facilities we have but build no new ones. For the intermediate time frame we need to ramp down our dependence and phase out older plants and those we can replace with low or no-carbon alternatives (perhaps gas as a "bridge" technology). But we need to be fairly aggressive on this (set specific time tables and deadlines) if we are serious about global warming control. Even with a rational and orderly phase-out of coal there is the danger that it will be too-little and too-late. Gerritt Rosenthal Tualatin