"What they're proposing is simply not allowable..."

The poor of the world were the hardest hit by price spikes in oil the last few years. But according to a scientist from NASA, as quoted by Wired, new technology to make cheap gasoline from coal is verboten: "What they're proposing is simply not allowable..."

Some excerpts from the Wired article:

Scientists have devised a new way to transform coal into gas for your car using far less energy than the current process. ... The new process could cut the energy cost of producing the fuel by 20 percent just by rejiggering the intermediate chemical steps, said co-author Ben Glasser of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa.

"The bottom line is that there's one fatal flaw in their proposed process from a climate protection standpoint," Pushker Karecha of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies wrote in an e-mail to Wired.com. "It would allow liquid fuel CO2 emissions to continue increasing indefinitely."

It's the very fact that coal-to-liquids could work that make them such a scary idea for people devoted to fighting climate change.

"What they're proposing is simply not allowable if we want to avoid the perils of unconstrained anthropogenic climate change," Karecha said.

Bottom line: The elite technocrats know what is best for us. We are just the ignorant masses who don't know any better and must be saved from ourselves. See the Wired article for all the requisite scary global warming cliches.

For the best information on the global warming debate, see this web site, voted the best Science blog on the Internet: watts up with that

For a much better article on the new, more efficient coal-to-liquids technology, see Researchers Propose New F-T Process for Synfuels.

That article, btw, includes the following quote from the journal Science which reports on the new process: "...the second part of the new process also represents a direct way of using CO2. If H2 is produced via nuclear, wind, or solar energy, this process becomes a method for consuming CO2 and may bypass the difficulties in the direct use of H2 as a fuel."

So nuclear power plants (high temperature fission reactors of various types) could be used to inexpensively split water into hydrogen and oxygen, and the hydrogen could be fed into this new process to create cheap gasoline from coal.

Sounds brilliant to me. Hopefully the NRC can get its act together and come up with a licensing process for the smaller reactors that would work best for such processes. It looks like there is some hope.