Coal is dirty. But coal is driving the U.S., Chinese and Indian economies. And therefore, coal is not going away. Renewable energy sources like solar and wind generate only 1 percent of the world's electricity. Do the math: Making coal burn cleaner might be the most pressing environmental problem that no one talks about.

Despite recent estimates that pollution from China's booming coal industry reaches U.S. shores in as little as five days, the green-tech investment boom that has funded the rise of biofuels has bypassed coal. Even the head of the World Coal Institute recently proclaimed the last 10 years "a lost decade" for clean coal, saying it's time to play catch-up.

Stanford's Jeremy Carl, a research fellow in the Program on Energy and Sustainable Development, couldn't agree more. He spoke on the phone with Wired News to discuss China, the holy grail of clean coal and how many coal plants he'd trade for Kyoto's accomplishments.

Stanford research fellow Jeremy Carl says, "Coal is as dirty as it gets," but warns against throwing the possibly cleaned-up baby out with the dirty bathwater.

Wired News: Why'd you get into clean coal?

Jeremy Carl: I looked at the numbers. It's a question of where the big sources of emissions are and where we can attack them.

WN: Can you give us an idea of the scale of coal power? Can you put coal in context as an energy source?

Carl: Only oil makes a bigger contribution to global energy. In terms of energy in the industrial world, it's about 40 percent of electricity production.

WN: How dirty is coal?

Carl: Coal is as dirty as it gets. Coal has every element in the periodic table. And depending where in the world you get it from, "coal" can mean 100 different substances. If you sent the sort of coal you might use in a typical Indian plant to a supermodern boiler in Japan, it would shut the place down.

WN: But there's got to be good things about coal.

Carl: It's cheap. And coal doesn't have the kind of extreme risk that nuclear power has. You're not going to build a dirty bomb out of coal. And unlike other fossil fuels, it is really widely distributed, so there is less of a coal OPEC.

WN: And that distribution would seem to make resource wars less likely to break out over coal?

Carl: Yes.

WN: Is there an energy source that could replace coal?

Carl: Natural gas is the only viable replacement, and it's not clear that the natural-gas supply could scale up to replace coal.

WN: So, how can we can make coal cleaner?

Carl: The most-well-known is flue-gas desulfurization, which takes sulfur dioxide out of smoke stacks, and came out of concerns about acid rain. There are other pollution-control devices for nitrogen oxide and mercury filters.

WN: What about up-and-coming technologies like carbon capture and sequestration? Can you tell us about that?

Carl: You're taking carbon from a smokestack and pressure-injecting it into a geological formation of some sort. We actually already do this process at an industrial level. We know how this works.

WN: Seems like we're spending a lot of time on the backend scrubbing pollutants out. Should we be designing in a cleaner process on the front end?

Carl: A lot of people point to integrated gasification-combined-cycle (IGCC) plants, which gasify coal before burning it, as the holy grail because they get you a cleaner process. It gives you a more concentrated stream of carbon that you can sequester underground more cheaply. The capital cost is very high, though, and we don't have a lot of experience in designing them.

WN: We hear a lot about China's coal industry. Can you compare it with the U.S. industry, which ranks second in the world?

Carl: We mine about (1.1 billion tons) of coal per year. China was at about 1.4 billion tons seven years ago. Now they are at 2.4 billion tons. So, they essentially took the second-biggest coal industry in the whole world and replicated it in seven years. And if you look at the Chinese plans, they plan to ramp it up even more in the future.

WN: Given the obvious environmental impacts of these plants, why don't we have better answers for these problems than the Kyoto Protocol (which the United States didn't sign, and which exempted China and India from emissions restrictions)?

Carl: I'll give you a speculative, personal answer. It has to do with the politics of the type of people who were negotiating Kyoto. And the pressure put on by environmental groups that were uncomfortable with coal. There was just so much pressure on the symbolic importance of getting a deal done.

WN: What would you have rather seen?

Carl: I think there has been some really good criticism that says, "Was the U.N. really a good forum for this? Or would it have been better to have taken the 10 countries who consume 60 percent of global energy and do something with real teeth in it?" I think that would have been a much better approach.

I would have happily traded every emissions gain from Kyoto for eight clean coal plants sequestering carbon in different countries. Because then we could have a real discussion that says, "This works. Now let's see who has to bear the cost."

WN: Why would that be such a big deal?

Carl: Because right now we're having a conversation with China and India where we're trying to get China and India to build clean coal plants by saying, "Here's this thing that's never been tried before at a mass scale. You should build one." And that's not going to work.

Gary Mukai, director of the Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education (SPICE), was awarded the Foreign Minister's Commendation at the official residence of the Consul General of Japan in San Francisco on Oct. 5. The commendation recognizes Mukai for "greatly contribut[ing] to the promotion of mutual understanding between Japan and the United States, especially in the field of education...[and] lend[ing] his energy and expertise to actively supporting and implementing the goals and objectives of the Japan Exchange and Teaching Program (JET Program) and the activities of the JET Alumni Association of Northern California."

Mukai has been developing curricula on Japan and U.S.-Japan relations for secondary school students since he joined SPICE in 1988. As part of his leadership of SPICE, he helps oversee the Reischauer Scholars Program, a distance-learning course co-sponsored by SPICE and the Center for Global Partnership at the Japan Foundation. Each year the program selects 25 exceptional high school juniors and seniors from the United States to engage in an intensive study of Japan. Though his own experience teaching English in Japan, from 1977 to 1980, predated JET, Mukai has been closely involved with the 20-year-old program. He has been an interviewer since 1989 and has also spoken at JET orientations and panel discussions.

In bestowing the commendation, Consul General Yasumasa Nagamine called Mukai a "bridge between our two countries."

Mukai accepted the commendation with characteristic graciousness, thanking the foreign minister and crediting his SPICE and FSI colleagues for the honor. "I am very humbled by this honor from the Japanese Foreign Minister," said Mukai. "I would like to say that none of my work at SPICE would be possible without my SPICE colleagues. Also, I truly feel indebted to my colleagues at FSI. Without them, SPICE wouldn't be what it is today and SPICE wouldn't have such an embracing home."

With regards to promoting cross-cultural understanding, Mukai said, "Since joining SPICE nearly 20 years ago, one of the highlights of my work has been working with Stanford faculty and the Consulate General of Japan, San Francisco, on helping young American and Japanese students better understand one another and appreciate the importance of U.S.-Japan relations."

Retired Stanford professor Daniel I. Okimoto, who recently received a medal of honor from the Japanese government for his role in U.S.-Japan relations, praised Mukai in a short speech. "No one deserves this honor more than Gary Mukai," Okimoto said. "I think Gary is a remarkable leader, mentor, entrepreneur, and friend."

Since 1976 SPICE has supported efforts to internationalize elementary and secondary school curricula by linking the research and teaching at Stanford University to the schools through the production of high-quality curriculum materials on international and cross-cultural topics. Housed in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University, SPICE has produced over 100 supplementary curriculum units on Africa, Asia and the Pacific, Europe, Latin America, the global environment, and international political economy. SPICE draws upon the diverse faculty and programmatic interests of Stanford University to link knowledge, inquiry, and practice in exemplary curriculum materials.

There is no consensus as to what outsiders can or should do in response to the dire situation inside Burma (Myanmar). At least that was the impression left by a vigorous discussion at a standing-room-only event convened by SEAF on October 18, 2007 on "Burma's Crisis: What Should Outsiders Do?"

Reviewing the protests that broke out in Burma in August 2007, swelled into mass demonstrations for democracy, and were brutally repressed by the junta in September-October, Maureen Aung-Thwin, who heads the Open Society Institute's Burma Project, argued for targeted sanctions. In her view, for example, cutting the flow of tourists to Burma would be less effective than spotlighting China's ties to the junta in the run-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics, when Chinese leaders would be especially sensitive to embarrassment. But if positive change could be achieved through engagement, that too would be worth trying, in her estimation.

Zarni, an author, activist, and visiting research fellow at Oxford University, differed from Aung-Thwin in recommending constructive and coordinated engagement. And whereas she thought that the political situation inside Burma, if it were to change at all, could change rapidly, Zarni argued that "gradual change is the only solution." Yet just as Aung-Thwin welcomed engagement, if that could promote democracy, protect human rights, and reduce the suffering of Burmese, so was Zarni amenable to sanctions if they could effectively serve such ends.

The willingness of both speakers to entertain a range of options reflected the difficulty of inducing change in Burma from the outside, and the corresponding inclination to be eclectic about options. One speaker from the floor went so far as to suggest that only physical intervention from the outside could end the repression. But of all the proposals suggested, that one appeared to be by far the least realistic.

Several speakers urged that China, India, and/or the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) be persuaded to put pressure the regime. But there was little faith in the room that Burma's immediate neighbors would sacrifice their economic interests, including access to Burma's natural gas, for the sake of promoting political reform. The sense of pessimism prevailing in the room prompted one person in the audience to suggest later that all one could hope to do was extend humanitarian aid to the Burmese people and wait for political reforms that might never arrive.

Suharto's authoritarian "New Order" regime in Indonesia unraveled quickly in 1998. Aung-Thwin recalled a conversation she had had that year with an expert on Indonesia. He had told her he expected the New Order to last a long time. Three weeks later, Suharto resigned.

Aung-Thwin offered this anecdote by way of suggesting that events in Burma, too, could someday catch observers by surprise. Also surprising, in view of this discussion, would be the effectiveness of any external action, on the full spectrum from sanctions to engagement, to induce the democratization of Burma.

The Asia Society Northern California and the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California-Berkeley co-sponsored this event with Stanford's SEAF. Of course none of the three is responsible for the opinions expressed on the panel or during the Q and A.

On October 2 FSI Acting Director Michael A. McFaul commenced FSI's annual orientation gathering for the 2007-08 academic year. After introducing new faculty and staff, McFaul turned the orientation over to scholars from CDDRL, CHP/PCOR, CISAC, Shorenstein APARC, the Program on Food Security and the Environment, and the Forum on Contemporary Europe, all of whom presented new research and outlined projects for the upcoming year.

CISAC senior research scholar Paul Stockton began with a presentation on "The Politics of Homeland Security," and was followed by Jean C. Oi, FSI senior fellow and director of the new Stanford China Program, who spoke about the Stanford Center at Peking University. Kathryn Stoner, CDDRL associate director for research, presented on "Promoting Democracy." McFaul moderated a panel discussion Q&A and, after a short break, introduced the second panel of FSI scholars.

CHP/PCOR core faculty member Grant Miller presented research that examines if "what people want" interferes with sound health policy in the developing world . New FSI senior fellow Josef Joffe discussed how America is both "a model and a monster" in the European consciousness; FSE Director Rosamond L. Naylor reviewed some of FSE's projects on biofuels and food security, and highlighted what they would be working on this upcoming year. Joffe, Miller, and Naylor each answered questions from faculty and staff before McFaul adjourned the 2007 orientation.