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>>Scott Pelley: The future of our climate might be summed up with one question, what do we do about coal? Coal generates nearly half of the electricity in the United States and in the world but it is the dirtiest fuel of all when it comes to carbon dioxide or CO2, the leading greenhouse gas. A few days ago the Obama administration declared for the first time that CO2 is a threat to human health and it plans to impose limits but making coal safe will come at an astronomical cost. After the economy this could be the biggest debate in Washington. And one of the most influential people in all of this is Jim Rogers. Coal has made Rogers and his company rich and that's why we were surprised to hear what this high flying power baron has to say about what coal does to the environment. [background noise] Jim Rogers wanted us to see America's enormous dependency on coal so he flew us out to one of his 20 coal burning power plants.

>>Jim: [background noise] I remember the first time I took a helicopter to look down in a power plant like this. I was 41 years old and I said, oh my goodness, I'm responsible for that?

>>Scott Pelley: Rogers is the CEO of Duke Energy, the nation's third largest electric utility. His smokestacks pump out 100 million tons of carbon dioxide every year which makes what comes out of Roger's mouth so surprising. Controlling carbon emissions in the near future is inevitable in your view. This is gonna happen.

>>Jim: It's inevitable in my judgment.

>>Scott Pelley: You're one of the biggest polluters in the world when it comes to carbon emissions.

>>Jim: We're one of the largest emitters and it tells you how daunting the challenge is that we have in front of us.

>>Scott Pelley: You know there are a lot of people, many in your industry, many people that you probably know who say that global warming is not a big problem.

>>Jim: It's my judgment it is a problem. We need to go to work on it now. It's critical that we start to act in this country.

>>Scott Pelley: Like a reformed tobacco executive Rogers says we can't survive the emissions his industry creates. He showed us what he means at a North Carolina power station that can light up 1 and a half million homes. How much coal does this plant burn in a given day?

>>Jim: Every day this plant burns roughly 19,000 tons of coal, that's two train loads and each train has about 100 cars.

>>Scott Pelley: This is what that looks like. See the train in the foreground and the train in the background? It's the same train, a mile long. The fact is America runs on coal and here's one of the reasons why, the Powder River Basin that stretches across Wyoming and Montana may be the largest coal reserve on earth. We've got 200 years worth of reserves cheap and right under our feet. No wonder coal generates half of our electricity. But here's the brutal part. [background noise] Coal is twice as dirty as natural gas and puts more carbon dioxide in the air than all of our cars and trucks. In short we're caught between a rock and a hot place. You know I noticed all of this comin out of the stacks, what is that?

>>Jim: That's good news. When you see a plume comin out of a stack of a power plant that's vapor and it basically says that this is, the emissions have been cleaned.

>>Scott Pelley: The power industry spent billions in the 1990's cleaning up most of the sulfur and nitrogen oxides that cause acid rain. But those pollutants are mere drops in a stream of carbon dioxide. Roger says getting rid of the carbon will require a new federal law to limit emissions and a new technology to clean up coal. At the same time he says Duke will transition to more wind, solar, and nuclear power.

>>Jim: Our goal line is to substantially reduce our carbon footprint, to decarbonize our business by 2050.

>>Scott Pelley: Four decades, that's a long time.

>>Jim: Well it took 100 years to get to where we are and we can't do this over night.

>>Jim Hanson: 2050 is too late. We will have guaranteed disasters for our children, grandchildren and the unborn.

>>Scott Pelley: Jim Hanson is NASA's top climate scientist. He's credited with some of the earliest and most accurate projections on climate change. He thinks that Roger's plan leaves the earth in the oven decades too long.

>>Jim Hanson: We are going to have to phase out emissions from coal within the next 20 years if we hope to prevent climate disasters.

>>Scott Pelley: Are you saying that we can't build any new coal fired power plants in this country?

>>Jim Hanson: Absolutely, not only in this country but in the world. This is not yet understood that we are going to have to have a moratorium on new coal fired power plants within the next few years and phase out the existing ones over the next 20 years or so if we hope to preserve a climate like the one that has existed the last several 1000 years.

>>Scott Pelley: You know Jim Rogers will hasten to tell you he does share your sense of urgency.

>>Jim Hanson: Well his plan doesn't match that.

>>Scott Pelley: In fact right now Rogers is building two new coal plants. You're talking a great game but you're building coal fired power plants.

>>Jim: I am following through on what is job 1 for me, making sure my customers have affordable, reliable, clean electricity.

>>Scott Pelley: And if we abandon coal at this point?

>>Jim: We can't abandon coal. We have to find a way to keep it and use it in the future and that means the ability to clean it up.

>>Scott Pelley: Roger's plan of cleaning it up over 40 years involves something that the coal and power industry promote as clean coal technology. In fact they say we can't live without it.

>>[background music] We have to continue to advance new clean coal technologies. If we don't we may have to say goodbye to the American way of life we all know and love.

>>Scott Pelley: It is a seductive idea. Cleaning up the carbon would solve everything. And during the presidential campaign both candidates endorsed clean coal.

>>President Obama: This is America. We figured out how to put a man on the moon in 10 years. You can't tell me we can't figure out how to burn coal [background cheering] that we mine right here in the United States of America and make it work.

>>Scott Pelley: [background talking] Well they did find a way to make it work. The problem is clean coal makes putting a man on the moon look easy. The technology is called carbon capture and sequestration. We found the only place you can see it in America, the Basin Electric Power Cooperative in North Dakota. Basin captures half of it's CO2 but they didn't build this because of climate change.

>>This is the carbon dioxide going into the ground.

>>Scott Pelley: Long before anyone heard of global warning, phasing was conceived in the Carter administration to prove that America could use it's own fuel, coal, and turn it into natural gas. They had to take the carbon out because it was an impurity.

>>[background noise] Before you started pumping it into the ground and into the pipeline where did it come out? That stack right up there.

>>Scott Pelley: Carbon capture takes the carbon dioxide, turns it into a liquid and pumps it underground. Virtually everyone agrees, industry, environmentalists and politicians that this is the only way we know to make coal safe for the planet. But consider tax payers built this for 1 and a half billion dollars in the 1980's. That would be 4 billion today. Dan Cannon says carbon capture would be an enormous national engineering project. He's a Berkley physicist and top expert on energy. Can enough carbon caption sequestration facilities like this one be built in time to prevent climate change from coal?

>>Dan: I don't think anyone knows the answer to that precisely. We know we have to try and we know that these facilities do work. Whether we can build enough of them to preserve the coal industry as it is today I think is the question.

>>Scott Pelley: How many coal fired power plants are there in the United States?

>>Dan: We have hundreds of coal fired power plants.

>>Scott Pelley: And each one of those would need one of these carbon capture sequestration plants.

>>Dan: That's right, that's right.

>>Scott Pelley: What are we talking about here in terms of infrastructure?

>>Dan: So we're talking about hundreds of billions to trillions of dollars or so and every power plant needs to capture it's greenhouse gases.

>>Scott Pelley: Did I just hear you say a trillion dollars?

>>Dan: A trillion dollars.

>>Scott Pelley: With a T?

>>Dan: With a T.

>>Scott Pelley: Joe Rome [assumed spelling] thinks a trillion might be optimistic. Rome ran alternative fuel projects in the Clinton administration. He says the amount of CO2 we're talking about is mind boggling.

>>Joe: If the world did this at scale it would be the equivalent amount of CO2 going into the ground as oil now comes out of the ground. So you have to recreate the entire oil delivery infrastructure of the planet which was built up over a century just to deal with this CO2.

>>Scott Pelley: Is it practical?

>>Joe: That we don't know yet. No one has ever taken large volumes of CO2 and stuck it in these deep underground aquifers and then measured and verified that it stayed there permanently. I mean after all if it doesn't stay there permanently, if it leaks out slowly it's not saving the climate. Remember we spent 30 years just trying to get one repository for nuclear waste, Yucca mountain, and we haven't succeeded. Now we're gonna need dozens and dozens of repositories for CO2.

>>It is not impossible. What we need in this country is what I would call a Marshall plan. We rebuilt the economies of Japan and Germany after World War II, we need to rebuild our economy and transition it to a low carbon economy. We can do that but it's gonna take trillions of dollars to do it.

>>Scott Pelley: Trouble is there is a Marshall Plan today [background noise] and it's rebuilding wall street. Add to that Congress projection of record federal deficits of a trillion dollars and it turns out not even the industry that warns of the end of our way of life is paying for it. How much has Duke energy invested in carbon sequestration technology so far?

>>Jim: We have not invested any dollars in the technology per se. We have spent a lot of time and money reviewing and analyzing the various technologies.

>>Scott Pelley: But come on, you admit to being the third largest carbon producer in the United States, you tell me that carbon sequestration is the future because we can't afford to live without coal but then you tell me you haven't invested any money in part of the sequestration.

>>Jim: While we haven't spent the money on sequestration technology, we've spent the time and energy and we're gonna co-invest with the government when this technology evolves.

>>Scott Pelley: If capturing carbon in the U.S. is decades away, consider that China and India now put more carbon in the air than we do and the Chinese are opening coal fired plants at a rate of 1 a week. None captures it's carbon. Now Rogers has broken ground on his two new coal fired plants despite warnings from top scientists like NASA's Jim Hanson. So when Jim Hanson says to save the planet we should stop building coal fired power plants today you say what?

>>Jim: I say Mr. Hanson, can't get done, won't get done. We've got to keep our economy going. We've got to make the transition and I'm gonna do everything I can with the greatest sense of urgency to make the transition but to do what you ask me to do now is just now doable.

>>Scott Pelley: President Obama wants to speed up cleaner technologies by taxing utilities for the carbon they produce but that idea is meeting some stiff resistance in congress. ^M00:12:28 [ Clock ticking ]