Oh..Great - Our Access To Coal Is Only Limited By Imagination

I hate to generalize, but I think the reality is you are either pro-nuclear or pro-coal.

An interesting aside, making gas from coal is possible, but sounds like not the most environmentally friendly process.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_gas#Environmental_effects

Wonder if anyone is researching a way to improve this process?

Awesome... we end our dependence on foreign oil by increasing our dependence on local coal. It sounds like a cigarrette smoker giving up his pack of Camels for a hit of heroin...

Why does the next big thing always involve giving more money to the commercial industry? Is reducing and simplifying simply too difficult a concept for people to understand?

-- Daniel Lunsford

Lovely. Just lovely. Because we should be looking to use coal one minute longer than we already are.

They are just going to mine Wyoming till its about four thousand feet below sea level. Real cute.

In the gassification process coal, carbon dioxide and steam react to give hydrogen and carbonmonoxide. This mixture is called syngas and can be burned in gas turbines. It is the cleanest possible way to turn coal into electrical energy.

Underground gassification of coal has a lot of advantages over strip mining; it doesn't leave the landscape looking like the surface of the moon for instance.

So if you realy have to use that coal, underground gassification might be the best way to do so (although currently it is still to expensive).

Coal is a great alternative to Middle East oil. The problem is that coal is currently used primarily in electricity generation plants. Putting coal in your car is little harder unless you utilize Fischer-Tropsch or Ultra-capacitor technologies.

Those technologies may help in the short run, but a moral society must learn to waste less if they hope for longevity.

"This mixture is called syngas and can be burned in gas turbines. It is the cleanest possible way to turn coal into electrical energy."

So what is created when you burn syngas? Wait, don't answer that.

I actually think the solution presented itself here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/1155057.stm

Camaroon has a volcanic lake with a tendency to kill everything around it by spewing CO2 into the air on the slightest sub-surface provocation.

So,we burn coal, take part of the resulting electricity, compress it until we have it in liquid form, them pump it into an abyss at the bottom of the ocean in the ring of fire. The pressures will allow the water there to absorb it and if it redistributes, it will be along paths already laid out by the volcanic activity there.

"Is reducing and simplifying simply too difficult a concept for people to understand?"

understand, no, stomach, yes. People like being clean and warm, they like being able to live where they want and work where they want, they like their cheap food and goods and internet and big screen TV's. All these conveniences and luxuries make them more able to deal with the stress of working so hard for companies and bosses who dont care much if they live or die. So yes, people could all urbanize and ride bikes to/from work, like in china, but who would want to? Yes, we could reduce our water usage by only showering every other day, or less such as in parts of europe, but who would want to? yes we could stop using our electronics so much and wasting power, but then how do we entertain ourselves?
Sorry dude, nobody in america wants to live that life! "you can save the planet!! just give up everything in your life that's fun and live like a monk!!" That message will convince only the most guilt-prone people. Even then, it will attract more hypocrites than anything else.
More useful would be to look for the places where large amounts of energy, water, etc. are being wasted on things nobody would miss. Huge amounts of water are wasted irrigating lawns full of hybrid grass, even in parts of the country where water is expensive, why not use a hardier grass that needs less water, or plant cactus and other desert plants that are native? Encourage people to use CFL light bulbs or LED's. Push for on-demand water heaters instead of the traditional tank type ones to save LNG. Develop alternative fuels like ethanol and biodiesel and work on electric vehicles, and in concert the clean power systems to support them like solar, fusion, and wind. Moreover, huge amounts of electric power are lost in transmission, using smaller independent substations, or having family-owned windmills or the like that feed back to the grid might save lots of energy. Reducing waste is sensible, and hard NOT to get anybody behind, once you have good science to back it up. It doesnt take drastic actions or changes to save the planet, just everyone learning a series of small habits and abiding a series of tiny changes to make it work.
telling people to just stop having civilization is just insane.

respectful buhatkj i couldn't disagree more.

the american lifestyle of consumption is killing us, literally. it is making us more unhappy every year and a growing portion of the population is figuring that out. stuff doesn't make us happy, healthy relationships with other people and with ourselves and with our environment make us happy. the rest is just window dressing. once you get past the false madmax scenarios about what a post carbon world looks like there is much more to be happy about than to dislike.

the future will mean less and that will be good.

aaron