For years, scientists have had a straightforward idea for taming global warming. They want to take the carbon dioxide that spews from coal-burning power plants and pump it back into the ground. 

President Bush is for it, and indeed has spent years talking up the virtues of “clean coal.” All three candidates to succeed him favor the approach. So do many other members of Congress. Coal companies are for it. Many environmentalists favor it. Utility executives are practically begging for the technology. 

But it has become clear in recent months that the nation’s effort to develop the technique is lagging badly. 

In January, the government canceled its support for what was supposed to be a showcase project, a plant at a carefully chosen site in Illinois where there was coal, access to the power grid, and soil underfoot that backers said could hold the carbon dioxide for eons. 

Perhaps worse, in the last few months, utility projects in Florida, West Virginia, Ohio, Minnesota and Washington State that would have made it easier to capture carbon dioxide have all been canceled or thrown into regulatory limbo. 

Coal is abundant and cheap, assuring that it will continue to be used. But the failure to start building, testing, tweaking and perfecting carbon capture and storage means that developing the technology may come too late to make coal compatible with limiting global warming. 

The Energy Challenge - Mounting Costs Slow The Push For Clean Coal 

meanwhile …..

The celebrity scientist and Climate Change Coalition candidate for the Senate, Karl Kruszelnicki, has described clean coal as a "complete furphy", likening it to Nazi propaganda. 

The colourful campaign of the physicist-turned-politician took a serious turn when he slammed Labor and the Coalition for propagating the "myth of carbon capture" and wasting taxpayers' money. 

"Goebbels, the Nazi propagandist, said if you're going to tell a lie, tell a big one, and this is a beauty," Dr Kruszelnicki said. "It is a furphy, a pork pie to cover up the fact that there is no such thing as clean coal," he said at Customs House in Sydney. 

Dr Kruszelnicki, who is standing on the Climate Change Coalition NSW ticket behind the organic farmer and author Patrice Newell, used a scale model of Sydney and a $10 tent to demonstrate the impossibility of storing the carbon dioxide produced by coal-fired power stations. 

Sydney alone would produce a cubic kilometre of compressed carbon dioxide every day as a result of the process, he said. 

“It’s a total mess,” said Daniel M. Kammen, director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. 

Clean Coal Is A Whopping Furphy Says A Filthy Dr Karl