Kathleen Sebelius, this blog's favorite Kansas governor/vice-presidential hopeful, gave an interview to Grist's Kate Sheppard that focuses on her environmental record and role in blocking a couple coal plants meant for Kansas. Interestingly, the argument Sebelius used is that the plants may not be profitable: The energy from the coal was meant for export, but all the carbon would stay in Kansas. Therefore if Congress actually passes cap and trade in the next few years and begins pricing carbon, Kansas could actually lose money on the investment, and then they'd be wrecking the planet and not even making money off of it. A lot of the debate became about whether or not we were incurring too much harm for the good that would come out of additional power. Very little of the power that was scheduled to be produced was for Kansas. It actually was electricity that would be exported to Colorado and Texas, yet we would own the carbon. And Kansas already has a tremendously heavy footprint -- I think we're 10th per capita in the country in terms of our current carbon footprint. So we would get all the carbon, and we didn't really need the power[...]It's compelling to make an argument based on the uncertainty of [the future costs of coal]. Virtually everyone acknowledges that there will be some additional financial costs, and until Congress sets a clear set of rules, nobody knows what that is. That leads to an argument about [whether] it is just economically foolish to make a significant investment when you don't know what the final costs will be if there are other alternatives.Savvy!
