Environmentalists Propose $50 Billion Buyout of Coal Industry - To Shut It Down

cartechboy writes "What's $50 billion among friends, right? At least Felix Kramer and Gil Friend are thinking big, so there is that. The pair have published an somewhat audacious proposal to spend $50 billion dollars to buy up and then shut down every single private and public coal company operating in the United States. The scientific benefits: eliminating acid rain, airborne emissions, etc). The shutdown proposal includes the costs of retraining for the approximately 87,000 coal-industry workers who would lose their jobs over the proposed 10-year phaseout of coal. Since Kramer and Friend don't have $50 billion, they suggest the concept could be funded as a public service and if governments can't do it maybe some rich guys can — and the names Gates, Buffett and Bloomberg come up. Any takers?"

Comments

Errr, no.

[blackicye]

This would never fly. The last 10% of the coal mines would just be laughing their way to the bank with this unexpected windfall.

opposite of brilliant

[brainspank]

imagine their sad faces when they realize that's what charges their electric cars.

Re:opposite of brilliant

[i kan reed]

You understand the point of electric cars is to enable the changeover from fossil fuels at a systemic level, right? The car doesn't care where the energy is coming from, allowing a regulatory framework to change as pragmatic options become available.

(My area's electricity is about 50% nuclear, 15% renewable)

Replaced by what?

[lgw]

This plan doesn't fund replacing the power from those plants with anything, just some hand waving about "renewable energy" being expanded in parallel. Cheap energy matters. The cost of everything we buy, everything we use, comes down to labor and energy costs. If you make energy more expensive everyone pays, and pays in a "regressive" way like a sales tax.

It might still makes sense, maybe, but it will take more than hand waving.

Re:This is what Thatcher was good at

[DNS-and-BIND]

Are you still dancing on that woman's grave? Jeez, conservatives didn't celebrate this much when Joseph Freaking Stalin died.

Didn't Hate Week sate your hatred? You know, the week after she died when you had hate parades to show just how much you hated her. No, seriously, this really happened. Hate parades.

Better uses for $50 billion

[MobyDisk]

You have $50 billion to spend on green energy. Make your choice:
1) Give the $50 billion to coal executives and shareholders who will then use that money to create new coal companies and open new mines, since you have done nothing to eliminate with the demand.
2) Build $50 billion worth of green energy to put the coal companies out of business for good.

The entire article is illogical. You can't just eliminate the laws of supply and demand.

Re:Better uses for $50 billion

[Rob Y.]

I would assume that this idea falls under the category of 'thought experiment'. The point being to highlight that the coal industry accounts for 'only' 50 billion dollars worth of assets, which is a smaller portion of our economy and total assets than the hysteria of 'anything you do to attempt to phase out coal will destroy America' would suggest.

Now if the country could shift to renewables for a mere 50 billion it might well be worth it. Of course, as others have pointed out, buying up all the coal plants won't accomplish that.

What about buying out the Chinese polluters?

[PseudoCoder]

Because they make US look like amateurs.

Re:This is more than a little bit naive.

[NatasRevol]

Well if the $50B includes buying up the lands/rights where coal is, no one else could go into coal.

But I think $50B towards wind/solar would help replace coal more than trying to block it out.

Not nearly enough money

[icebike]

In addition you have to replace a whole bunch of brand new highly efficient and scrubbed power stations, and totally shut down steel production.
Metallurgic coal (coke) is essential for steel production. That pushes steel production to other countries, causing a world wide shortage, and we end up paying more and they end up polluting more.

Coal gasification projects, current and planned, would all be wiped out exactly when they are needed.

You can't simply look at the market cap of coal industry companies on Yahoo and sum them all up.
Like most plans, this is a simplistic and simple minded approach. It would never work

Re:This is more than a little bit naive.

[PlusFiveTroll]

There are many things that won't move on. Metallurgical coal for example. You'll drive up the price of other goods associated with the products made with it. That is ignoring that the power companies own many of the coal mines. You not only have to pay for the coal mine, but the loss of power generation directly.

TL;DR: Article is ignorant of how the coal industry works.

Retraining

[Anonymous Coward]

The whole "retrain" workers gets me.

Retrain them for what?

Let's assume that all of those workers have the talent to be retrained in any field. What would that be?

Are the billionaires also going to pay those folks to move to areas of the country that have other industries besides coal? Would the billionaires start other industries in coal country to absorb the workers?

Retraining is just a fantasy for policy makers. Folks get retrained and find that they still can't get a job. Part of the reason is that the labor market is still really tight and employers are not willing to hire entry level people because they don't have to. There are plenty of experienced people looking.

Anyway this "article" is nothing but a "what if" by the author; so it's not to be taken seriously.-+

Re:This is more than a little bit naive.

[Anonymous Coward]

The article is ignorant of how basic economics work.

Sowhere will the electricity come from?

[sandbagger]

I guess we'll be building a lot more nuclear power plants, then?

Re:This is more than a little bit naive.

[Alsee]

The WOC folks are attempting to use force

If someone offers you a pile of money for your home, and you decide to sell it, it's wild ideological nonsense to say they're taking your home by force.

-

Re:This is what Thatcher was good at

[Pino Grigio]

What a moronic comment. Her `unworkable ideology' has been the centre ground of British politics since around 1986. Even the Labour party dropped it's idiotic "ownership of the means of production" rubbish under Blair and nobody on the left, apart from the usual loons, are arguing to bring it back.

If you want to see what a post neo-liberal political ideology looks like, go to a shop in Venezuela.

Re:This is more than a little bit naive.

[gurps_npc]

While it is true that theoretically scientifically, we have clean coal technologies available, Coal is still the dirtiest and worst of the power technologies.

This is because of two reasons. 1) Truly clean coal technologies are expensive - more expensive than solar powered or wind power. So practically nobody uses it. and

2) Coal companies - more than any other power industry - have found ways to avoid complying with regulations. Specifically, they campaigned hard to allow existing plants to go unregulated until after they 'modernized' in the normal course of time. Then they refused to modernize - for the past 60 years.

Tuna fish is one of the healthiest cheap foods you can eat - or rather would be EXCEPT for the mercury in it which comes from coal. Coal burning plants are more radioactive than nuclear power plants because small bits of thorium are in coal and when you burn it, it gets wafted up into the air and settles around the coal plant. Not to mention the acid rain and the green house gas issues.