Dear Editor,

It is simply amazing to see Tashfeen Ahmad’s parroting the ‘clean coal technology’ line, which speaks to “technological options which reduce emissions, reduce waste, and increase the amount of energy gained from each tonne of coal”.

The emissions commonly removed are sulphur dioxide and metal oxides, such as lead, cadmium, arsenic, etc, by use of filters and reacting the acid-forming gas sulphur dioxide with limestone (releasing carbon dioxide and leaving gypsum). The tons of toxic particulate matter trapped by the filters merely has to be put in a hazardous waste dump located usually in somebody’s backyard.

However, the main greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, produced by burning coal and scrubbing the flue gas, is not, and will not be captured in a Jamaican power plant. This is simply because there is nowhere to put it, no deep caverns where we could compress it and store it forever.

Has it not dawned on Ahmad that rising sea levels, an increasingly hotter planet, more droughts, as we are having, is a result of burning coal which is mostly carbon and releasing gigatons of carbon dioxide into our atmosphere. God help us if the oceans warm up enough to catastrophically and suddenly release the vast reserves of methane — an even worse greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide — stored as solid clathrates.

Think, man!

Howard Chin

hmc14 @cwjamaica.com