You have a new paper that will be coming out on the implications of peak oil in the climate debate. Can you tell us a little about the conclusions of that report?

The main point of that paper, which I think is fairly important, is that gas and oil already have enough CO2 in them to take us to approximately the dangerous level, and perhaps beyond the dangerous level. It's pretty clear we're going to use those fuels, and it's not practical to capture the CO2 in oil since it's used in mobile sources. Some of the CO2 from gas used in power plants, you could capture the CO2, but there are no plans to do that yet.

That means that the only way to keep CO2 from exceeding 450 parts per million would be to say we'll have no more emissions from coal, and that would mean that we should not be building any more coal-fired plants until we have the sequestration technology. A molecule of CO2 from coal, in a certain sense, is different from one from oil or gas, because in the case of oil and gas, it doesn't matter too much when you burn it, because a good fraction of it's going to stay there 500 years anyway. If we wait to use the coal until after we have the sequestration technology, then we could prevent that contribution. I don't think that has sunk in yet to policy makers, because there are many countries going right ahead and making plans to build more coal-fired power plants.

Therefore the sooner Peak Oil arrives, the better off we will all be.  

A quicker stabilization of greenhouse gas production will be just one of the benefits.  We'll also experience less pain re-orienting our lives.  And we'll run less risk of wildly overshooting our little planet's oil-subsidized capacity to support the human population ... a level I fear we overshot some time ago.  (After all, industrial agriculture, today, is essentially nothing more than an efficient process of converting petroleum and natural gas into food)

That said, your comment that "we in the developed countries [should] immediately phase out coal" is about as likely to happen as Paris Hilton giving up partying.  With oil dwindling, but no corresponding sign of dwindling human appetites for energy, energy, and more energy, I'm not optimistic.  

You'll phase out coal as soon as you can pry the determined hands of every yuppie driver off of their beloved Hummer steering wheel.  As soon as you can convince people to live in smaller houses.  As soon as you can reverse exponential population growth.

Indeed.  We've barely begun the long process of turning the hulking oil tanker around as we approach those rocky shoals ...

Getting off coal may be easier than you think. Have you been following Richard Heinberg's articles on peak coal at the Energy Bulletin? He cites a recent study that predicts peak coal in China, the US and the world by 2020.

While you're at the EB check out Kjell Aleklett's article on fossil fuels and global warming.(He's, a petroleum geologist from Upssalla university in Sweden and president of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil.) He chastizes IPPC for not taking a realistic account of the amount of coal/oil/gas actually remaining in the Earth. In his analysis there just isn't enough oil and gas to produce any of the senarios IPPC envisions (A1/A2/B1/B2). (The mildest case, B2, leads to one degree warming.)

http://www.energybulletin.net/29845.html

This doesn't seem to jive with Hansen's peak oil analysis, since he thinks oil/gas alone can take us to 450 ppm.

Obviously there has to be more study and data transparency, but there is the sliver of hope that temperatures will be limited enough to prevent a runaway greenhouse.