More than 100 coal power plants are proposed in the US, and far more than that in India and China.
It is important that wealthy countries build power plants only with carbon capture and storage (CCS) and help fund third world countries so that they can as well. Let’s start with US behavior first.
How do we fight the proposed coal power plants built without CCS?
It makes sense for us to write our newspapers, and contact our legislators, pointing out the advantage of a system like in California, where utilities are required in making plans to assume an ever increasing carbon tax. It makes sense to point out that increased costs of mitigation of greenhouse gases and adapting to (or just plain losing out to) climate change will swamp the small savings in electricity costs.
Other arguments? Other people to argue with, besides newspapers and legislators?
Update — responding to the comments Why the opposition to gasification with carbon capture and storage? For a century or so, this is an option (or appears to be, a large test must be run, smaller tests have worked to date). Injecting oxygen rather than air (1/5 oxygen) produces 1/5 as much waste gas, and this gas can be injected into oil wells and coal seams. While not as low carbon as nuclear power, it is much better than current coal power plants, and presents a good option for countries with a lot of coal that insist on using it.
We should fight all the coal plants and only settle for IGCC as a last resort. IGCC doesn’t solve the carbon problem, it just holds out hope of addressing it decades down the road (if it work). In the meantime, sky-high carbon emissions go up the stack.
We should have a moratorium on coal until the problems are worked out.
The Sierra Club, PIRGs, and other groups are actively fighting all new coal plants.
The best way to fight them is by making them unecessary through demand-reducing energy efficiency, supporting regional and Federal efforts to cap CO2, and by bringing new renewables online.
Check out this new report on the coal rush:
http://uspirg.org/uspirgnewsroom.asp?id2=25586
Check out this report on factoring carbon into electricity planning:
http://www.synapse-energy.com/Downloads/SynapsePaper.2006-06.Climate-Change-and-Power.pdf
For technical assistance on IGCC, try the Clean Air Task Force
http://www.catf.us/projects/power_sector/
Your readers might like to know that IGCC stands for Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle. It doesn’t look any more promising to me than it does to Roger, but I had to look it up, so I assume others readers might also need to.