Phasing Out Coal Power in Canada? - Green Inc. Blog - NYTimes.com

The interesting twist is that Mr. Prentice also suggested that operators of coal-fired plants will be eventually required to replace them with some other form of generation.

“The concept is that, as these facilities are fully amortized and their useful life fully expended, they would not be replaced with coal,” he told the newspaper, which is based in Toronto.

Summary of Yesterday’s Conference Call With Rep. McCarthy (R-CA) and Rep. Scalise (R-LA) - Skanderbeg’s blog - RedState

The hearings in Energy and Commerce have been quite a circus, with some 60 witnesses testifying with regard to Cap-and-Trade. The main point of Cap-and-Trade is that it is - pure and simple - an energy tax. When it’s packaged as something nice and fluffy and cost-free, it can look palatable - but when the rough truth that it all amounts to stiff energy taxes (that become more onerous over time) is made clear, support for it collapses with startling rapidity.

(Apparently, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) is starting to hit the panic button over this one for obvious reasons - and is actually trying to prevent Cap-and-Trade from coming up for a vote. This has also led to Democrats being assailed over at the Puffington Host - all I can say to that is, “Please pass the popcorn.”)
...
First, there is a certain frustration among Congressional Republicans with Al Gore continually being swanked around on this issue - particularly given his financial interests in this space. He has greatly enriched himself just by babbling about this issue, was even working as Vice President with a prototype of a Cap-and-Trade plan with Enron (!!), and has enormous financial interests via his “green” investment firm Generation Capital Management and as a partner in the blue-chip Silicon Valley venture firm Kleiner-Perkins. (I pointed out that Moe had this on the front page earlier this week.) This is clearly a conflict-of-interest situation - a charge Mr. Gore regularly (and often falsely) metes out at others but which is absolutely applicable to him.
...
As hinted at above, I did want to add something here. Whenever I hear about all the time and energy being spent on things revolving around “climate change,” I can’t but help to note how completely surreal these discussions are - since they carry an echo of the Greek city-states arguing furiously about things like the proper placement of statues at the temple of the Oracle of Delphi while ignoring Philip of Macedon moving his troops into Thessaly. Right now, it’s strange to see so much time and effort being forced to be devoted to purely imaginary crises (and AGW is a purely-imaginary “crisis”) while real crises are being largely ignored.

RealClimate admission: The science isn't settled

There is uncertainty in the climate sensitivity of the Earth and in the response of the carbon cycle, and the papers are extremely useful in the way that they propagate these uncertainties to the probabilities of different amounts of warming.
...
The sorts of emission cuts that are required are technologically feasible, if we were to build wind farms instead of coal plants, an integrated regional or global electrical power grid, and undertake a crash program in energy efficiency. But getting everybody to agree to this is the discouraging part.