Power plant president to speak on climate

There's too much rhetoric and not enough informed opinion out there about global warming and what to do about it, says the president of Utah-based Deseret Power.

"People have this sense we're warming," said Kimball Rasmussen, whose company operates a coal-fired power plant southeast of Vernal. "The question is: What can we honestly do about it?"

Rasmussen has been invited to the Public Utilities and Technology Interim Committee meeting Wednesday to give state lawmakers a presentation titled "A Rational Look At Climate Change Concerns." He said he wants to give legislators "perspective" on the issue.

Rep. Michael Noel, R-Kanab, is chairman of the committee and someone who has repeatedly spoken out against global-warming assertions made by the scientific community and environmental groups.

Rasmussen, however, said he doesn't dispute that carbon-dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants have a "warming influence" on the Earth's climate. His sources are the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

The IPCC was formed in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization and the Untied Nations Environment Programme as an "objective source" on the causes of climate change. The OECD was established in France in 1961 and has 30 member countries, including the United States, that look to the group as a data source on "evolving patterns" in the environment.

"Let's talk about where we go from here," Rasmussen said in an interview Tuesday. "It's been so caught up in emotion and ideology, and we're not making rational decisions."

While not specific about which decisions, Rasmussen said that in general, he doesn't want to see public policy hamper the economically prosperous environment he said the United States needs in order to develop "green" technologies.

From coal-fired power plants the United States contributes about 2 billion tons of carbon-dioxide emissions annually, compared with 30 billion tons of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere worldwide. Scientists have predicted that by 2100, the global climate will warm by 3 degrees Celsius because of greenhouse-gas emissions, including carbon dioxide. Rasmussen said shutting down the U.S. coal-fired power-plant industry would reduce that amount to about 2.93 degrees Celsius.

Rasmussen said his company has begun investigating wind and solar sources for electricity and is relying to a small degree on hydroelectric sources at the Glen Canyon and Flaming Gorge dams. The Deseret Power regional electrical cooperative owns 223 miles of transmission lines and generates 550 megawatts of electricity.