Carbon sequestration and the true cost of everything

The Gristmill provides the couterpoint to my earlier article about using waste efficiently. In the words of big coal insider Richard Coutrney "everybody knows cs [carbon sequestration] would be too expensive." Let's examine why this should be.

First, we'll start by breaking down the total cost. Off the top of my head, I can come up with something like this:
True Cost = Manufacturing Cost + Environmental Cost + Social Cost

I'm calling the manufacturing cost how much money it takes to turn raw materials into a product. The environmental cost is how much it costs to clean up the damage to the environment. And the social cost is a catch-all for items such as health, inconvenience, etc. All the deaths coal causes each year from pollution, black lung, and so on would be a social cost.

The only thing reflected in the price of coal-fired electricity (or any other good) is the manufacturing cost. In this case, the cost of the coal, plant, and employees. Adding in the cost of carbon sequestration forces some of the other environmental and social costs into the price of the electricity. The price/kWh will increase because more of the true cost is being paid by the consumer.

Compare this to clean energies like wind and solar. The environmental and social costs are much lower in those cases but the manufacturing cost is higher. If the manufacturing cost is all that matters (which is the case right now) these are not attractive alternatives. If we as consumers were somehow forced to bare the total cost, things might look different.

This has been done before. When SO2 was being cracked down on, scrubbers were installed in smokestacks. In the final analysis, this was a relatively cheap operation. But the threat (acid rain) was great enough that consumers were willing to pay the extra fraction of the true cost.

Carbon sequestration is a losing strategy because it coal is a process with a large true cost. Efficiency, like that demonstrated in the Ford example, is more appealing as the true cost is lower to begin with. The trick is making this point obvious.