London, England, has always been famed for its fog. But nothing eclipses the days leading up to Christmas 1952.

At first, the fog was a dense white, forcing the metropolis's famed fleet of black taxis and red double-decker buses to crawl through the city at speeds on par with the pedestrians inching their way home through the darkening streets of Piccadilly and Knightsbridge. By the evening of December 5, things were seriously amiss. A stubborn temperature inversion had so thoroughly settled over the city that trapped smog was seeping into buildings. The opera was cancelled. The singers literally couldn't see the conductor.

In the ensuing hours, a constricting cordon of trapped particulate turned the air lethal. At its height, visibility was so bad that people venturing outside could stretch their arms before them and not see past their elbows. The infamous “black fog” would last five days.

“Visibility,” Barbara Freese writes in her small but rich book Coal: A Human History, “was limited to a mere eleven inches.” Hospitals were filled with Londoners perishing from the smoke. But many of the 4,000 or so people killed by this episode never found medical help. Fifty bodies alone were removed from one city park.

After almost seven centuries' worth of complaints about the abysmal air quality in the “Big Smoke”, laws were finally enacted in 1956 barring the burning of soft coal in London. Air quality rapidly improved, and, in the developed world, at least, the event marked a milestone in what many mining and government officials today call the move toward “clean” coal. Half a century later, however, it is the unseen byproduct of coal's use as a source of heat and electricity—carbon dioxide, or CO2—that has, or ought to have, people very worried. With projections for staggering surges in atmospheric greenhouse gases as a result of continued fossil-fuel burning, including abundant reserves of coal, alarm is growing over how much global temperatures might increase because of heat-trapping gases. Respected bodies, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, estimate that the range could be anywhere from a troubling 1.4°C to an outright alarming 5.8 degrees this century. Warmer temperatures are already fingered as a major contributor to unprecedented insect attacks now devastating forests in central British Columbia and the Yukon. And much worse may lie ahead. Rapidly melting glaciers and ice sheets at both ends of the world could raise ocean levels by four to six metres in coming centuries. More frequent and violent hurricanes are predicted. And site-specific weather changes will force adjustments to or end crop cultivation in various parts of the world, with continued fossil-fuel burning only exacerbating these and other problems.

But is this inevitable? Surely fossil fuels can be phased out, replaced by environmentally “benign” renewable energy sources like solar, tidal, and wind power. What about increased reliance on nuclear power? What about tapping vast, underutilized geothermal energy sources? What of that dream fuel of the future, the one with harmless water emissions: hydrogen? Although these and other sources may be increasingly important in a global energy system lurching toward perhaps a quadrupling of its size this century, it is the stuff of dreams, if not irresponsible, argues Simon Fraser University economist Mark Jaccard, to dismiss fossil fuels from future energy scenarios. Contrary to contemporary warnings of rapidly dwindling fossil-fuel reserves, Jaccard says, there's lots out there, particularly coal. The big question is: can it play an important role in a growing and diversified global energy system without wreaking further climatic havoc?

Blessed as we are with hydroelectric power, it might be tempting to think of B.C. as a “cleaner” energy jurisdiction than some. But in an increasingly global economy, the coal we ship elsewhere—and we ship a lot of it, primarily for use in steel production but also to feed coal-fired electrical plants—is a shared challenge of humbling proportions. And what about all that CO2 we blithely continue pumping into the atmosphere as glaciers retreat and massive chunks of ice calve off Antarctica?

The most visible sign of Western Canada's role in the international energy trade juts in a hard, straight line into the waters separating the Mainland from Vancouver Island and ends in pyramids of darkest black. Opened in June 1970, the Roberts Bank coal terminal, 40 kilometres south of downtown Vancouver, is the largest of its kind on the West Coast of the Americas. Fittingly, W.A.C. Bennett was there at its opening. As B.C.'s longest-serving premier, he became synonymous with energy megaprojects, including Williston Reservoir, that windswept water body that cleaves north-central B.C. and that owes its existence to the giant, earth-filled dam that cuts across the Peace River and that today bears Bennett's name.

On any given day, six trains arrive at Roberts Bank, their 125 cars or so laden with heaps of coal. Once there, workers at the port offload the coal from the trains and later transfer it to ships. Since its opening, coal from Roberts Bank has filled the holds of about 7,000 ocean freighters and the facility has moved some 540 million tonnes of the sought-after commodity. Workers there still boast of having put more coal on one vessel than any other freighter in the world: 239,084 tonnes aboard the Hyundai Giant in May 1987.

Car passengers waiting in line to catch the ferry to Vancouver Island at the terminal just south of Roberts Bank may watch as the rusting holds of ocean freighters are loaded with the black stuff. They may also catch glimpses of ships pulling anchor and setting a southern course that will take them into Juan de Fuca Strait and from there north and west into the Pacific, where the journey to the distant ports of Korea, Japan, and China really begins. As they sit in their steel-and-glass cocoons, they may even reflect that the comfort and ease of movement they enjoy have, at their roots, coal-fired steel furnaces. Do they connect the dots further back, say, from about 290 million to 354 million years? For in that distant time, one might say that our present dilemma took shape.

Over the roughly 64 million years that marked the Carboniferous period, much of the Earth was covered in a profusion of wildly fantastic plants, including the ancestors of today's ferns. Those ancient ferns, though, had thick trunks and were taller than three-storey buildings. Alongside them were rooted gigantic versions of today's horsetail, that spire of a weed with its stubborn roots. And then there was the lepidodendron. Capable of attaining 40 metres in height, with two-metre-thick trunks covered in scaly, lizardlike bark, the lepidodendron is today portrayed in fanciful artistic renderings with moplike tops of metre-long leaves. But some paleobotanists believe that the leaves may have sprouted from the trunk down its entire length, making the tree the botanical equivalent of a shaggy giraffe. All this rich plant life, Freese writes in Coal, was buffeted over eons by rising and receding oceans, which, in turn, were triggered by advancing and retreating glaciers. With each cycle, another layer of plant life was buried under water and sediment. Squeezed by tremendous pressure in the absence of oxygen, which ordinarily would have decayed the fallen plants, the organic material turned first to peat and later to hardened coal, locking in masses of carbon.

Closing in on 290 million years later, humanity's insatiable appetite for heat, light, and energy is reversing that process. What was locked inside the earth is being excavated and burned with a vengeance, and atmospheric CO2 levels are climbing ever higher.

In The End OF OIL, one of many recent books to sound the alarm over a coming energy crunch, author Paul Roberts offers a host of statistics. The more sobering of them forecasts just how much more rapidly our burning of fossil fuels could increase in the years immediately ahead despite all the warnings about what that implies for our rapidly warming planet. China, in particular, is poised for mind-boggling increases in coal use, particularly thermal coal to generate electricity. With its skyward economic growth, the world's most populous country needs more and more power. “According to one forecast, to meet its demand for electricity, China must build as many as sixty 400-megawatt electric-power plants every year for the next decade, and most of them will burn coal,” Roberts warned in 2004. “By 2050, more than a third of the energy consumed by China and its neighbors [particularly India] will come from coal.”

In business articles published at about the same time that Roberts's book came out, China's economic growth for 2005 was pegged at nine percent. A Reuters story noted that the country faced power shortages and transportation “bottlenecks” with the potential to “starve up to 200 million Chinese of the coal required to heat their homes”. Despite huge domestic coal supplies, China was importing both thermal coal and coking coal for steel production. Its coal imports were poised for annual increases of 64 percent, much of it destined for use in the world's largest steel industry. And its workers were suffering under air-quality conditions that rivalled those of industrial-era Britain.

Far from vilifying China, Roberts notes that it is perfectly understandable why the country is doing what it is. Lacking abundant domestic oil supplies, limited in natural gas, and, with the coming completion of the Three Gorges Dam across the Yangtze River, now running out of hydroelectric sites, China is bound to exploit its most abundant fossil fuel and rely on facilities like Roberts Bank to round out its needs. Besides, in Roberts's own country, the U.S., entire mountains are being levelled in states like West Virginia and Kentucky, waterways are being buried or at the very least badly polluted, and air emissions are, in many cases, worsening as coal use there increases as well. Today, a little more than half of all of America's electrical production is coal-fired, thanks, in part, to unease over nuclear power but also because of the sheer abundance of domestic coal supplies. In 1980, American electrical utilities burned 500 million tons of coal. By 2000, despite having built few new plants, they were burning 900 million tons, a near doubling, much of it in older, highly inefficient, and heavily polluting plants.

What makes reading Roberts so disquieting, however, is that he sees no easy way out as the world's population continues mushrooming. By 2100, the attendant power demands associated with so many more people could be four times more than is consumed today. Surveying the scene, Roberts sees reason to be excited about energy conservation. There's also plenty of renewable solar, wind, and tidal power, with European countries and Japan leading the way. Increased reliance on relatively “clean” fossil fuels like natural gas can also play an important role as “bridging fuels” in the quest for a cleaner, more secure energy future.

But then the problems begin, Roberts says. Renewable energy facilities can't be built just anywhere; they must be relatively close to where the power is consumed, and they will be hampered by the vagaries of nature. The wind doesn't always blow. The sun doesn't always shine. Readily available supplies of hydrogen and hydrogen fuel cells remain “decades away from mass deployment”. Nuclear energy is hamstrung by technical, political, and economic problems. And the much-vaunted promise of nuclear fusion, the so-called good nuclear power, is a century or more away. Given all this, Roberts says, perhaps half of what we will need by way of future energy sources has yet to be discovered by science.

Mark Jaccard scoffs at such notions. Following a lunch-time presentation to the Association of Professional Engineers in Victoria, the SFU professor and author takes exception to the suggestion that we can't make do with the energy sources we are already more than familiar with. “The technologies are there. The energy is there. We don't need to talk science fiction here,” Jaccard says between signing copies of his new book Sustainable Fossil Fuels: The Unusual Suspect in the Quest for Clean and Enduring Energy, which on April 27 won the prestigious Donner Prize, awarded to the best book on Canadian public policy.

More than one person has done a double take at that title. The words fossil fuels and sustainable in the same sentence, let alone a phrase, seem oxymoronic. Readers may also do a double take at the book's cover—surely the author and publisher's intent—which features a photo of someone outfitted in a green, plastic-covered dinosaur costume riding a bike along a wet pathway. Is our overwhelming dependency on fossil fuels taking us the way of the tyrannosaur? Or is that no doubt well-intentioned environmentalist on the bike working up a heavy sweat for nothing?

Jaccard's take on energy sustainability is that energy sources should endure for long periods of time, although not necessarily forever, and be clean. Moreover, we need to think about how an expanded energy system, including fossil fuels, can help improve human health and well-being. Used as we are in the West to power at the flick of a switch, we tend to forget that two billion people in the world today live without electricity, burning wood and other biological material in open fires and highly inefficient stoves. As Jaccard notes, up to 1.6 million people die prematurely each year as a result of constantly breathing in particulate-laden smoke.

Jaccard's book is a hypothesis, a prediction, really, of how the global energy system could unfold as we attempt to meet human needs in a world where the population is poised to climb from six billion to 10 billion people by 2100. Like Roberts, Jaccard remains skeptical about how far renewable energy can be pushed. But he is far from discounting its tremendous potential. His scenario for wind power, for example, is like Nortel's stock-value appreciation before its great fall—an 820-fold increase in output this century, while solar power rises at 13 percent per year for 50 years before leveling off to five percent annual growth through 2100. Big increases are also forecast in tapping into the heat trapped beneath the earth's surface (geothermal) and in the burning of wood residues and other “biomass” under extremely high temperatures, which generates power that is then fed onto hydro grids. But even with all this robust growth, we will need more, much more.

No less than James Lovelock, the man famed for developing the Gaia hypothesis, which argued that Earth itself is a single living thing, has advocated that in order to head off a climatic catastrophe we need to look very seriously at expanding nuclear power. But even he might be shocked at what this means. In Jaccard's scenario, nuclear power triples over the next century, at which point it is responsible for six percent of the earth's power production. To get there, we would need to build 2,275 new nuclear plants and refurbish and keep running everything that is already in production.

Which brings us to what Jaccard calls the “unusual suspects” in his future energy system: fossil fuels. At some point, we will reach the end of oil. But it is still a ways off. Clearly, the fossil fuel receiving the most attention these days is oil, and with good reason. Jaccard acknowledges its growing scarcity, noting that if we increased our present use by just half of one percent per year we will tap out conventional oil in less than 150 years, and the peak could be as early as next year. For this reason, his scenario has oil use declining over the next century. But for natural gas, the use more than doubles between now and 2050, and by the end of the century it is still 68 percent higher than today.

And then there's coal. World reserves are estimated at 1 trillion tonnes. The potential resource could be seven times that. The amount out there is “substantial compared to our current use rate”, Jaccard says. Thus, he predicts that through this century worldwide coal consumption could increase six-fold. Small though the rise is when compared with renewable energy sources, the implications of such a surge are breathtaking. By 2100 nearly half (47 percent) of our total global energy system would be fired by the black stuff.

Robert MacIntosh—an economist, retired banker, and Ontario author who has penned a report for the C.D. Howe Institute called The Approaching Energy Crunch—recently took issue in the pages of The Globe and Mail's book review section with some of Jaccard's assumptions, particularly around oil. But on the issue of the SFU economist's writing on coal, MacIntosh was unequivocal: “The role of coal in the global energy supply mix of the future is being greatly underestimated by most observers. Jaccard makes the case convincingly that clean coal to produce electricity is feasible, both technically and economically, even with the cost of removing carbon from the atmosphere and the conversion of coal to gas and liquid forms.”

Like the words sustainable fossil fuels, many regard clean coal as oxymoronic too. The extraction and burning of coal has triggered all kinds of problems, from underground fires that have burned for decades to acid rain to gaping holes in the earth.

Technological advances have taken many troubling pollutants out of the emission stream from coal-fired electrical plants, but the technology is far from uniformly applied. The technology also exists to capture CO2 from the coal-waste stream and pump it deep underground. CO2 capture is already occurring in another sector of the energy economy—the oil-and-gas industry—where it is sometimes being piped and later pumped underneath subsurface oil and gas reserves to add pressure and assist in their recovery. The coal industry, Jaccard says, needs to follow the same approach. “We can't keep using the atmosphere as a free waste receptacle.”

One of the most relevant present- day examples showing that this can be done is already underway in southern Saskatchewan, near the community of Weyburne. To the south of Weyburne, 320 kilometres away in North Dakota, a plant is gasifying coal, turning it into hydrogen-rich gas for use in various industrial applications. (Coal, by the way, is routinely gasified in South Africa for use in automotive fuels.) Since 2000, CO2 from the North Dakota facility has been carried by pipeline to an aging oilfield just south of Weyburne and then injected underground to free up more oil. Over the next three decades, the intention is to move 20 million tones of CO2 through the pipeline and, hopefully, permanently “sequester” it underground.

Already, public power utilities such as SaskPower are casting ahead to the day when new power sources will have to be found to service their population, and they are drawing up scenarios for new coal-fired plants that could capture carbon and store it underground. Not only do they believe that the Weyburne project shows that this is possible, but they believe that it would be more cost effective then major solar-energy installations. (Other jurisdictions, such as the United Kingdom, are in the design stage for such coal-fired plants, with one of the major players being, of all companies, British Petroleum, which these days is starting to bill itself as “beyond petroleum”.)

Besides, says Rick Patrick, the Saskatchewan utility's vice president of planning, environment and regulatory affairs, a government down the road may start to set limits on CO2 emissions. “It makes sense [for us] to figure out what the up-front costs are to prepare [a full carbon-capture coal-fired plant],” Patrick says.

For his part, Jaccard says regulations are needed to kick-start increased carbon capture and storage. He believes recent initiatives in California provide a good model. There, the government introduced a phased-in set of requirements for low or zero-emission vehicles on state roads, helping to speed up the arrival of hybrid cars in North America. Governments now need to do the same thing to start curbing CO2 emissions. First, realistic and achievable targets need to be set, with reasonably short time lines, and from there the bar is progressively raised. The requirements will spur technological innovations, which, over time, will lower prices, making it more viable for poorer countries to follow the developed world's lead.

Skeptics of carbon storage abound, Barbara Freese among them. Near the end of her book Coal, she offers a cautionary tale from Lake Nyos, whose waters fill an old volcanic crater in Cameroon, Africa. Below the lakebed, carbon dioxide seeps up from the volcano's geothermal vents. Moving up, it dissolves in the lake's deep waters. Late in August 1986, however, the continued seeping of carbon dioxide caused the lake's waters to reach their CO2 saturation point. With unanticipated ferocity, the lake's waters were essentially upended. What was locked at the bottom was thrust to the top “in a violent, froth eruption of seltzer water that flew some eighty metres into the sky”, Freese writes. Heavier than air, the CO2 cloud drifted down the mountainside, overrunning the villages in two valleys below and smothering as many as 1,800 people and 3,500 livestock. “Today, the lake is constantly vented with a fountain to keep it from happening again.”

Nobody should discount the risks associated with attempting to lock up a gas that may move, Freese warns.

But, as Jaccard's frankly mind-boggling projections of what may lie ahead suggest, we face great danger in doing nothing but maintaining our present course. Burning fossil fuels is not going to stop. We better look for somewhere to park all that associated CO2—and sometime soon.