'Clean coal' technology fails to capture world's attention

Construction costs have ballooned to $6.5 billion, at least three times the original estimate, making Kemper one of the most expensive power plants ever built and pushing up electric bills for Mississippi Power's 186,000 customers.

Carbon capture entails catching the carbon emissions from a power plant or cement or steel factory and injecting them underground for permanent storage.

Despite decades of research and pilot projects, however, carbon capture is still waiting for its breakthrough, illustrating how hard it is for the world to do something about global warming even when the tools are there.

In 2013, Norway pulled the plug on a major carbon capture project it had likened to the moon landing, citing spiraling costs.

Another big setback came on Nov. 25, just days ahead of the U.N. climate talks in Paris, when Britain abruptly canceled 1 billion pounds ($1.5 billion) in funding for carbon capture technology, raising doubts about the fate of two projects competing for the money.

Groups like Greenpeace and WWF say climate action should be geared toward 100 percent renewable energy such as wind and solar power, not toward throwing a lifeline to fossil fuels.

[...] authoritative bodies like the International Energy Agency and the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change say that without deploying carbon capture technology on a large scale, the world may not be able to reach the U.N. goal of keeping man-made warming below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), which governments hope will stave off some of the worst floods, droughts and heat waves associated with rising temperatures.

Of the more than 170 countries that submitted action plans ahead of the conference, only eight explicitly mentioned carbon capture as a potential mitigation measure, according to an analysis by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany.

While the world's thousands of coal-fired power plants are the single biggest source of man-made carbon emissions, only one of them is equipped with carbon capture technology: the Boundary Dam power station in Saskatchewan, Canada.