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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?"
For one, more plants would just spring up. Even if part of the buyout was "you may never go into coal again," someone else may. The economic structure of energy is why coal is still king, and buying out the current players won't change that.
For two, the cost of shutting that industry down does not cover the cost of starting new energy industries to replace it. Or were we just going to go without 37% of our electricity?
For three, coal works efficiently and predictably at far smaller scale than most energy technologies. Many of the locations coal services today cannot be practically services by other generation methods.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
This would never fly. The last 10% of the coal mines would just be laughing their way to the bank with this unexpected windfall.
It's the main reason we mine coal, it's cheap energy. Without it energy prices would skyrocket.
Just google U.N. Agenda 21. It is a blatant attempt by the liberal left to install a global socialistic government and destroy the freedom's our country has fought so hard to protect. It must be stopped.
imagine their sad faces when they realize that's what charges their electric cars.
It's only a model.
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.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
another 85,000 out of work and retraining does not mean shit when they have no paycheck anymore and no new jobs to replace what was lost.
The U.S. is just one country. Many other countries (China, for instance) are still using coal, and I think will more or less say the same thing: That's nice. We'll keep using coal. Want to be real heroes of the environment? Raise enough money to buy out the coal industry all over the world.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Cost of solar panels are below $1 a Watt making them an ideal replacement of Coal.
Think of how many panels could be purchased with this money.
The coal industry would shrink to almost nothing.
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.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
To me $50 billion does not seem a reasonable figure, when you factor in something else has to be built to provide the energy the plants are currently reliably producing.
That something would take a long time to build, if in fact it could be built at all (as many locations now want nothing to do with new power plants). Any viable replacement would not meet any definition they had of being "green", unless they are OK with nuclear power which seems unlikely (and again, how many replacement nuclear plants will be built for just $50 billion)?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
What happens to all the people who live and work in mining towns? Murder the coal mines and what have you done to all the families and small businesses that, directly and indirectly, depend on them? This is a headline straight out of Atlas Shrugged... has the whole world gone bonkers?
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.
No mention either of contractual obligations to municipalities or business like large manufacturing plants, etc. Lawyers are salivating over this idea.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
I assume the proposal just assume coal industry to produce electricity, but there is more than that, The iron industry and steelmaking industry also uses coal.
Because they make US look like amateurs.
"Now, I doubt any of you would prefer a rolled up newspaper as a weapon against a dictator or a criminal intruder."
Where's the damn kickstarter?
As the supply of cheap power is decreased the value of the remaining generation will increase. The value of a power plant if the present value of future profits. Remove coal from the supply and power prices go up. That makes the remaining coal plants worth much more.
25 billion might get you the first half. 50 billion will never get it all.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
It's a valuable energy source. What's to stop anyone (eve the current coal company people from founding a "competing" "coal" company that actually digs coal and sells it?
According to the US Energy Administration...
In 2012, the United States generated about 4,054 billion kilowatthours of electricity. About 68% of the electricity generated was from fossil fuel (coal, natural gas, and petroleum), with 37% attributed from coal.
Energy sources and percent share of total electricity generation in 2012 were:
Coal 37%
Natural Gas 30%
Nuclear 19%
Hydropower 7%
Other Renewable 5%
Biomass 1.42%
Geothermal 0.41%
Solar 0.11%
Wind 3.46%
Petroleum 1%
Other Gases 1%
Ahh, yes! That low, low, price doesn't include the price of building renewable-power plants to replace those coal fired ones that are to be shutdown, nor does it even include any budget for sending out lots of blankets to prevent millions from freezing to death during the next cold spell. Nope, that part is entirely left down to others, and specifically to the government and thus taxpayers money. So, yeah, $50b to buy and shutdown the plants, and then what, maybe $500b of pork on a good day to replace them with renewables? Sure, sounds like a good deal to me...
I think I'll just chalk this up as another ill thought out scheme that'll never work.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unintended_consequences
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
"When I grow up, I want to cure world hunger!" The coal will still exist, people will still find coal, people will still want coal, etc., etc.
You betcha.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
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
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Because if this ever started to get traction, the price of those coal mining companies would start to go up, just like virtually every other company that gets targeted by a hostile takeover. Even if they get enough to cover that, the boards of these companies could conceivably use a poison pill and issue discount options to everyone else to dilute the bidder's interest.
You know that old joke ... Will the last one out turn off the lights.
How do these bozos plan to power the lives 300+ million Americans who like to read at night, watch TV and have electric appliances do their laundry and wash their dishes.
And don't just say, "solar" or "wind" without including the cost (in $Gazillions) and time (in decades) to build out an entirely new infrastructure while inventing some way to store power for calm nights.
Nuclear? Great. Better start changing regulations and lining up money. Lots and lots of money.
Which would encourage us to find NEW coal supplies anywhere.
(If at first you don't succeed, do it different next time!)
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.-+
Had Scargill not tried to bring down the elected government by flexing the miner's muscle maybe the scenes of violence could have been avoided, but I'll grant you that anywhere the Met (London Police) got brought in it turned nasty, but that's more a reflection of the Met than Thatcher - the Met are _still_ a little too handy with their fists (see Ian Tomlinson)
Eclectic beats from Leeds, UK
handmadehands.co.uk
Then the country falls apart because so much electricity comes from coal. Without a replacement it there would be vast blackout crippling large portions of the country. Let's get on it!
I find being offended by me offensive.
so since the squillionnaire coal owners claim to be market-based fans, we can attain the same attrition by sticking to our guns in enforcing the upcoming regulations on cutting back emissions. the cost moves to the users, which will probably find natural gas cheaper anyway.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Felix: Gil I'm afraid I've fallen and injured myself. Can you call 911?
Gil: Of course. I'll just use my cell phone. Oh, wait. That's right. Without coal, the cell towers don't have power.
Felix: We'll take my Telsa then. Can you drive it?
Gil: Of course. Oh dear. The batteries are dead. And without coal there's no power to charge it.
Felix: Hmmm...I'm not feeling well. Can we try your solar powered car?
Gil: Sorry, too cloudy, it won't even start.
Felix: Smoke signals?
Gil: I'll just carry you to the hospital.
Felix: I guess that will have to do.
Gil: Of course, once we get there the hospital won't have power because there's no coal.
Felix: I'm beginning to re-think my life choices...
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
They should try Kickstarter!
Sounds complicated. Just burn them and their customers with excessive taxes.
And use those taxes to put the miners on welfare.
Yuh.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Yes, it's okay to hate thatcher, if you're British. She did terrible fucking things to her own country in pursuit of an unworkable ideology. It'd be okay to hate Stalin this much if you lived under him.
You have no idea just how stupid you sound. If you can compare Thatcher to Stalin... you have to be an idiot or totally ignorant. Not liking her policies or ideology is one thing, comparing her to one of the greatest mass murderers in history is another. Grow up. It may be the internet but it has enough ignorance without this.
Isn't there a city in your "midwest" (which is actually pretty far east, no?) that's called the windy city? Seems like wind power might be a reasonable thing in that region.
You know you can use electricity to produce heat, right?
What are you going to do with the ~37% loss in energy production?
This would take decades to phase out and far more than 50 billion dollars.
Click bait
And there is no way they are going to shutdown their production and usage of coal. This plan would essentially put them in the driver's seat of the world economy.
So. They'll use that money to nail the coffin shut on any mining community. Not that it isn't bad there already. What difference will one more unemployed Oxy-addicted miner make in towns already filled with them?
No worry for them. Obamacare will take care of it. Let's assume they had the money and *right now* they could just do it. In theory the clear air helps us, but that's literally a diffuse effect that's hard to measure. The local economic impacts are much more tangible.
Unless their plan also involves a way to shore up the individual lives and tax bases of the communities, it's really just carpet-bagging. I mean, wow, the land-spec alone is something to consider:
1. Depress community.
2. Scoop up land at bargain-basement prices
3. Develop "eco tourism", replace union mining jobs with minumum-wage service jobs.
4. Profit!
I have an uncle that is an ex-GE now consulting engineer in the coal power plant industry.
Many power plants are dual fuel: coal or NG. They run whatever is cheaper. And the thing is, at least with modern equipment coal burns as clean as Natural Gas. It even scrubs the metals out of the emissions: no mercury being emitted - or at least 99% of it.
Coal gets a bad rap because of its history and China - they're using 19th Century technology.
You know, General Electric is doing some great things with fossil fuels AND "Green" energy. It royally pisses me off when I hear "Green" energy (solar, wind, geothermal, hydro) labeled as "Liberal" when in fact it's the MOST capitalistic industry out there.
If anyone calls "Green" energy a "liberal" cause, they are just expressing their ignorance.
Finding jobs with Health Care for the workers who may be out of work / in retraining / working at mcd's that does not really offer it.
The 1872 GMA law, signed by Ulysses S. Grant to hasten western development during the Apache Indian Wars, gives mining companies 1) right to lease rather than buy the land, at about $5 per acre, 2) no responsibility for remediation and pollution cost, and 3) no obligation to pay taxpayers any royalty on what's mined from the Federal Land. After 137 Years, it was nearly (finally!) updated in 2009, but candidate Barack Obama cut a deal with Nevada Senator (D) Harry Reid.
As for coal, according to Bureau of Land Management "BLM has responsibility for coal leasing on approximately 570 million acres where the coal mineral estate is owned by the Federal Government. The surface estate of these lands could be controlled by BLM, the United States Forest Service, private land owners, state land owners, or other Federal agencies. BLM receives revenues on coal leasing at three points: 1) a bonus paid at the time BLM issues the lease an annual rental payment of $3.00 per acre or fraction thereof, 2) royalties paid on the value of the coal after it has been mined. The Department of the Interior and the state where the coal was mined share the revenues." News Flash: The total fees collected do not even cover the costs of staff at the Interior Department or BLM!
Most of the mining done on the federal lands is hard rock mining (copper, gold, silver, etc.) but that is also the highest source or carbon and toxics (47% of all toxics released by all USA industry). It bankrupted Superfund (14 of the 15 largest sites are metal mining on federal land). The mere suggestion in 2009 that the GMA might be reformed caused stock in recycling companies to go up, and commodity hedge funds to go up.
Gently reply
What about the rail unions who may stop this who don't want to lose the work.
Quite frankly, you're wasting your time.
Most of the owners of coal stocks intend to hold it.
You'd be better off investing in more efficient coal-burning plants that cause less waste and less pollution, including GHG emissions, from the same unit of coal.
You're also missing that a lot of the country is national and state parks and federal lands (like military) which are forced to lease lands with coal at insanely low rates for mining.
Fix those things. Your money will go farther.
(personally, my carbon impact is about 1/10th of most Americans, so Do More, Whine Less)
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
The Federal Reserve spends 85 billion a **MONTH** on quantitative easing. Yet 50 billion will buy out the entire coal industry of the United States? Something is wrong there.
Except raise the prices of electricity. The Coal plants will just import form overseas and the proce to consumers will be higher as a result. Not that raising the price won't change the economics, but it won't kill the industry like they seem to assume here. It would be better to pour their money into some R&D to find a better substitute with a lower cost green alternative. After all $50 Billion with a 'B' would certainly help find better technology if in the right hands.
Think of the birds! Wind power kills birds. Can't have that! Unless you take out all the animal activists first..... and while you're at it, take out the environmentalists... then of course you'll have to take out the lawyers, so they don't put you on trial for murder... then the politicians, they'll just make a mess of everything all over again.... I think that sort of reduction of population would be enough to bring energy usage down to a point where coal won't have that much of an impact on the environment anymore.
Well it was iron ore where I lived. Coal was indeed uneconomic because it was all deep shaft mining after the easy stuff had been got at.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
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.
For #1, the 50 billion would buy the properties. They couldn't start mining again unless they find another deposit somewhere.
But coal is such a low margin business, it doesn't make sense to enter it. All of the current producers have been around for a LONG time.
Some of the complaints is in how much it costs to scrub out all of the soot, CO2, etc, and how the costs from going to 80% to 90% clean is so much more expensive than cleaning the first 50%.
How about just fund to put the cheap technology to get at least some level of scrubbing in China or whoever else is using coal?
(yes, I know ... there are two major flaws in this argument; (1) the particles that aren't caught may be the ones that have more significant health effects; (2) if coal is then seen as 'clean', when only less bad relative to unscrubbed coal (and not other alternative energy sources), we reduce the arguments for why people should cut off coal all together ... but it still seems more cost effective than just thinking you'll buy out all of the production)
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
As always, these plans call on **other people's** money to do what their little hearts desire. And note, one suggestion was government funding. You know, taking money from people who are against their idea to fund it. As always.
I guess we'll be building a lot more nuclear power plants, then?
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
This plan would essentially put them in the driver's seat of the world economy.
You say that like it's a bad thing. Their economy seems to have been doing rather well for some time now, especially compared against ours.
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
I'm REALLY curious as to what they expect to replace the coal mining business with in the middle of rural West Virginia. Even assuming you could retrain all those workers, that simply leaves an entire army of now skilled workers sitting in towns that have had their economy completely decimated by the elimination of coal. One doesn't simply regenerate a brand new, magic economy there from scratch. Even something as basic as building a new factory, say a solar panel factory, would require not just the cost of building the factory, but the infrastructure to support said factory (roads, water, power, rail links, etc.), and $50B is not going to cover the cost of doing that for 87,000 workers.
According to Wikipedia:
"The mining law applies to some mineral products, but not others, and the list has changed over time. Since 1920, the list of locatable minerals does not include petroleum, coal, phosphate, sodium, and potassium. Rights to explore for and extract these are leased through competitive bidding." (Emphasis mine)
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
If this starts getting any traction, I need to start buying coal company stocks. You and some others get to feel good. I get rich. Win-win.
Cheers,
Dave
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
There are fields, OakDragon, endless fields where hipsters are no longer born, they are grown.
No, but all the A.C.s have been. I can prepare a list if you like.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
to be technical, she was just the prime minister. nothing royal about her!
The similarities were not lost on all concerned at the time.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Actually, the Labour governments before her shut down more mines than she ever did; a considerable number more. But don't let the facts spoil a good fantasy. If anything destroyed the miners it was union militancy; the useful idiots of the left who allied themselves with Soviet Russia.
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.
I fully support making this change in a way that makes everyone better off. I don't think the people running coal power plants are necessarily evil or deserve to lose their livelihood, but we find ourselves in a position where coal is just not a good thing to be doing.
If you really wanted to kill coal power generation using government intervention, then the more logical thing to do would be to put in place a tax that will only impact coal power stations, and use the money brought in from that tax to subsidize green power stations built to replace the coal ones. If the tax starts low but increases every year, then the transition could be gradual, but coal might still be eliminated on a reasonable time scale.
I agree pretty much wholeheartedly that the coal companies need to die. But a 50-billion dollar payoff to an industry that is proud to poison the skies, destroy the landscape, and ruin the drinking water? Give free money to the people who want the USâ(TM)s environment to become more like Chinaâ(TM)s? Oh, HELL no. Put them out of business by any other means necessary. But letâ(TM)s not give those bastards a single red cent. Seriously. Screw those guys.
A better idea would be to impose (and enforce) strict carbon and particulate caps, deny permits for strip, open-pit, and mountaintop-removal mining, and crippling penalties for release of mining and processing chemical waste into the water supply. And you know what? If the coal companies are willing to reform themselves to operate within those constraint as good corporate citizens, fine. I will reform my opinion of them if and when they do. But otherwise? Screw âem.
And if weâ(TM)re going to spend 50-billion dollars on getting the US off of coal, letâ(TM)s do it the right way and use it to fund R&D on alternate, cleaner, energy sources: efficient photovoltaics, energy-positive fusion, thorium or fast-breeder fission, and so on.
Imagine all the people...
The buyouts are pointless, as the coal industry is going extinct all on it's own. With the advent of hydraulic fracturing, the price per BTU for coal is almost twice cost per BTU for natural gas. Not suprisingly, US coal consumption has been going down since 2008. There's little reason to buyout coal plants and mines that are going to go bankrupt anyways because they can't compete with natural gas.
All we really need to do is eliminate the government subsidies to the coal industry that are slowing down this process.
I'm not going to take advice from someone who uses the term "neoliberal" to mean its literal opposite.
The source of the parent quote above is the Bureau of Land Management federal website. Perhaps whoever authored your wikipedia article is making a distinction about the "Mineral Leasing Act of 1920" which is derivative of the GMA. Or perhaps Jack Abramoff's mignons have been editing your wiki. But again, this is from BLM.gov
http://www.blm.gov/wo/st/en/prog/energy/coal_and_non-energy.html "BLM has responsibility for coal leasing on approximately 570 million acres where the coal mineral estate is owned by the Federal Government. The surface estate of these lands could be controlled by BLM, the United States Forest Service, private land owners, state land owners, or other Federal agencies. BLM receives revenues on coal leasing at three points: 1) a bonus paid at the time BLM issues the lease an annual rental payment of $3.00 per acre or fraction thereof, 2) royalties paid on the value of the coal after it has been mined. The Department of the Interior and the state where the coal was mined share the revenues."
Again, the total fees collected (GMA 1872 and MLA 1920 combined) do not even cover the costs of staff at the Interior Department or BLM!
Gently reply
Just how big is the British steel industry today?
I'd say the whole thing was uneconomic.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Ignoring the plethora of other problems this would face, wouldn't this be shut down by the anti-trust/monopoly laws?
and they just had came up with strip mining in the USA. Whole mountaintops in West Virginia were removed along with coal and it was a lot cheaper than underground mining.
Indeed, I don't claim to be knowledgeable about this subject. I know next to nothing about mining.
However, reading the Wikipedia page on GMA-1872 leaves me with one burning question... Is it possible for me to lease land from the federal government for $5/acre?
At the top of the entry, I see "All citizens of the United States of America 18 years or older have the right under the 1872 mining law to locate a lode (hard rock) or placer (gravel) mining claim on federal lands open to mineral entry". Now, perhaps you have more insight into this than I do... presumably, any piece of federal land west of the Great Plains will contain at least a single atom of platinum, gold, silver, copper, lead, zinc, uranium or tungsten. Would I be eligible to stake a claim and get myself an acre for $5, and retain that claim for as long as I perform "at least $100 worth of labor" every year? Presumably, 14 hours of digging around with a spade would be sufficient (assuming labor is valued at the federal minimum wage)?
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
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.
Liberals hate conservatives but they REALLY hate conservatives like Thatcher and Reagan who got it right. Conservatives like Bush Jr. and Palin are easy targets and ad hominem attacks that discredit the person rather than the ideas. Thatcher and Reagan put their ideas into operation and both countries benefited. That's what really pisses off the liberals. They'd rather have the country going down a rat hole the way GB was under Labour governments than admit a conservative like Thatcher was right.
Cheers,
Dave
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
This is what economists call a Coasian Solution to a problem of externalities. Coase's Theorem states that if trade in an externality is possible and there are sufficiently low transaction costs, bargaining will lead to an efficient outcome regardless of the initial allocation of property.
"Royal" in the figurative sense.
Forgot we're talking about a nation that still has a monarchy, probably should have clarified that remark.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Too bad they don't also have a concrete plan to match the decrease in coal-generated power with something more environmentally friendly.
From the article:
If at the same time the US accelerates expansion of renewable energy sources and transmission facilities, this could be accomplished with no interruption to electricity supplies, adding only about a penny or two to each kilowatt-hour on electricity bills.
It's be more useful to spend 50 billion developing and installing cost-effective renewable energy sources that are cheaper than coal. Then coal would go away on its own via capitalistic drivers.
The similarities were not lost on all concerned at the time.
I'm certain they weren't :)
The real question is, did anyone marching in these "hate parades" have the balls to carry a giant sucker and sing, "we represent / the Lollypop Guild..."
Because that would have been epic.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Wiki
That's what Thatcher was all about.
... Now what? Because as the Germans figured out when they shut down their nuclear plants and went to wind power, they have to build a coal power plant for every wind farm as a back up power supply.
Why? Renewable power is not reliable. It is also sometimes seasonal giving more power at one time of year and much less at others. Which means you need something else to handle the power needs in lean times.
Coal, for all its flaws is reliable. If you have coal stockpiles you have power.... winter, summer, spring... you have power.
You can also store coal very cheaply in huge quantities. Compare the energy storage capacity of a pile of coal with any battery, capacitor, flywheel, whatever you can imagine and obviously the coal will have a higher energy density and lower cost.
Okay, so it has the CO2 and global warming and all that hilarious stuff. But the fact is that the coal is reliable and we need reliable power to sustain modern infrastructure.
So, environmentalists... if you REALLY want to change the world... you need to come up with ACTUAL replacements for the things you want to remove from our system. Not half assed super expensive quasi broken replacements that literally kill people through failure. Because if you impliment that, people will get mad and they'll reverse their support and instead support anyone that can turn the lights back on. Which means that coal power plant you just shut down... will fire right back up rendering your whole campaign a total and complete failure.
So again... here are your choices.
1. Come up with actual replacements to fossil fuels that are competitively priced without subsidization or the same subsidization as fossil fuels enjoy. People always bring up that fossil fuels get subsidies as well... fine... same subsidies... no more. And it has to be as reliable as fossil fuels. People need to be able to count on it come hell or high water.
2. Utterly fail wasting the time, money, and public respect of everyone that supports you.
Those are your two choices.
I appreciate option one is difficult. That is however the task. Half assing it is not acceptable if you presume to shut down coal and nuclear plants.
What I personally prefer as a method to reduce fossil fuel use is a mixture of things that reduce our dependence on coal and nuclear power but still retains them to take whatever load we can't meet.
So for example, put solar panels on your roof. Put up a wind turbine. Install some Syngas/biofuel generators that turn farm waste/leaf litter/etc into power/fuel/compost. Make everything more efficient so it uses less power.
Do all of that and the number of big nuclear and coal power plants will be reduced. We just won't need as many of them. BUT if something happens... lets say its a really dark month with a lot of cloud cover, its really cold, maybe the wind isn't blowing, etc... Don't you want the power to flow to your house regardless?
Of course.
So please don't undermine the supporting infrastructure of the power grid. Coal and nuclear have their place. And that place is valid until people are generating enough of their own power and their technology is efficient enough not to need the coal and nuclear.
Please environmentalists... don't destroy yourselves by going off half cocked.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Not in the UK they don't. Owen Jones, for example, is one of the loons I'm talking about. He's all over the TV, radio and newspapers here.
Oh, I see, you meant to imply the entire world is either neo-liberal or like Venezula. That's so stupid a parsing of your statement it didn't even occur to me.
Why don't you give some examples of countries that are successful economically that don't enjoy the fruits of economic liberalism? I realised Marx' ideas were asinine by the age of around 13. Why didn't you?
"Enjoy the benefits of some economic liberalism"!="being neoliberal". You can shut down idiots who are anti-union, pro-corporate psuedofascists, without saying "hey competition on price and private ownership of capital are bad". If one scrolls to the bottom of the article there, you can see that list of criticisms? Every one of those is pretty damned important.
Race-to-the-bottom and casualization of labor are both particularly important problems that lay unaddressed, other than "in theory".
One of the largest coal miners in the US (e.g. Arch Coal) has annual revenues of just under $5B and they claim to supply 17% of the US' domestic energy supply. Their Black Thunder mine produces around 115 Mt per year.
To put that into context, the US mines approximately 1 Gt of coal per year. At around 66 USD/t, you couldn't even buy all the coal the US produces in one year, let alone the companies that produce it for $50 billion!
The costs of purchasing a mine, then shutting it down in a socially and environmentally sustainable manner, are astronomical. The cost to acquire a SINGLE COAL PROPERTY (not even the company that owns it) can easily hit $0.5 - $1 billion, then you have to PAY to close it down and do something with the THOUSAND people who work there. Then you have to repeat this with every single mine, and who is going to do the phase out work and what are you going to pay them with?
The life of a mine may be 50 to 100 years and a lot of the costs for "close out" are reduced to their "net present value". As an oversimplified example, if it will cost $100 to build a fence in 100 years, and you get 2.5% return on every dollar you save for the purposes of building that fence, then you need to put in just under $9 today to pay for that fence in 100 years time. Regulations vary depending on the state / province / territory, but in many cases the company will need to pay the NPV of all their closure costs up front. If you prematurely close out the mine, you better hope you have enough money to cover the lost 20, 50, or 100 years of additional investment and interest, or you may go to jail.
It would be cheaper to do a pilot project in Centrailia, PA to build a power plant to generate steam from the coal already burning underground.
Just curious, if you improved the insulation on your house, how much would that save you, potentially? Did you try that and how well did it work?
I think I invested a couple thousand on insulation for my roof and it cut my winter heating and summer cooling by 30% and the whole house just *feels* more comfortable. I think I made the investment back in two years--heating done with natural gas, cooling done with electricity.
--PeterM
Coal produces fully one-third of all electricity in the US, what exactly is the plan to make up for that lost generation capacity? In ten years?
Also, eliminating the US consumption of coal does nothing about the ever-increasing use of coal in China where they are bringing new coal-fired generators online at a rate of one per week...
Ken
It takes around 9 billion to build a replacement Nuke for a Coal plant. Solar, yeah right -- no base load on solar! There are hundreds of coal plants. Even if you switched to natural gas it would cost around 1-2 billion apiece! 50 BILLION is enough to fund the closing of maybe 5% of the coal plants in the country without human factors.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
In principle, ownership by environmental groups is a good way to preserve a resource. There have been multiple instances of environmental groups buying property they wanted to protect. One that comes to mind is Ducks Unlimited, which buys wetlands to preserve them.
But there are at least two issues with buying coal mines: (1) as they buy more mines, the value of the mines that are left goes up; (2) as the price of coal is driven up by lowered supply, mining becomes more profitable and new mines are likely to open.
So they could certainly buy the mines, but they cannot buy the coal industry.
These comments are mine; I do not speak for my employer.
Yes, and out here in the windy midwest, the same liberal idiots who wanted the wind energy are the same liberal idiots who are now screaming and crying for us to take OUT the wind farms that were built, due to the turbines killing migratory birds. They don't want ugly wires, poles, transformer stations, wind turbines, or coal. They just want their techno-toys to work on magic and unicorn piss.
Nah! The unicorn piss pollutes the water.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Get out of coal, replace it with nuclear, and eliminate all subsidies for the unsightly sprawl of the new generation of renewable trinkets.
Yes, there are good renewable power sources: concentrated, zero emissions, with a small environmental footprint per gigawatt of output. THIS is a renewable power source done right: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...
50 billion dollars spent buy^H^H^Hlobbying politicians would allow you to get many laws passed imposing big carbon taxes on coal, making it uneconomical compared to alternative energy sources like natural gas.
The fact is, that if we pull all of the coal out of production, then we must get our energy elsewhere. Where will it come from? Probably burning more nat gas, and then by importing more oil to replace the nat gas that WAS slowly replacing the coal.
What is REALLY needed is NOT to kill coal outright, but to convert it to methane via GPE. At that point, we move our coal power to a MIXTURE of nat gas, new atomic, Renewables, and storage (better to handle variable demand loads).
And if we REALLY wanted to kill off CO2, then the best thing that America can do is put a tax on ALL GOODS CONSUMED (local and imported) that is based on where they and parts come from. If high CO2 / $GDP, then high tax. If low CO2/$GDP, then low tax. Simple as that. It will force all nations to participate since USA is the world's largest importers.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Let's shut down coal production, then go after fracking, then shut down every single hole in the ground that delivers any kind of petrochemical, then push in every control rod in every nuclear powe$ plan% in ghe U.X., t en go *fter
NO CARRI
Circle the wagons and fire inward. Entropy increases without bounds.
Unfortunately this is just another idea that bolsters the industrialist notion that environmentalists are idiots. This plan attacks the supply side but does nothing to stem demand – the key piece of capitalism. A more likely result would be in a spike of coal prices leading to a huge new land grab and expansion of strip mining by the newly enriched (and bought out coal companies) with race to be the new coal supplying Barron. The only way to beat them is to displace the coal industry with some other industry. Pure money into a clean fuel research, the next and more efficient battery technology, super conductivity, fusion . Anything but incentivizing the current model.
First of all, this would end up costing at least twice what they say it would. Let's say the first coal plant sells for $1B. The second one says...hmmm...they got $1B...I can get $1.2B....and so on.
Secondly, the US is far from the largest coal user and polluter. Even if you could shut down every coal plant in the US you would have to repeat the process in every country in the world that uses coal (starting with China). Yeah, good luck with that.
Thirdly, they suggest having it publicly funded or letting the rich guys pay for it. Obamacare is the latest huge publicly funded project in the US. Before that, it was TARP funds for infrastructure projects. Both of them have failed to meet stated goals. Both of them went vastly over budget. Both of them were rife with abuse and cronyism. Am I the only one that sees a pattern here?
So let's get the rich guys to pay for it. Ahh...the battle cry of the Socialist. And how is that going to happen exactly? Are we, the public, going to ask them to voluntarily give up large swaths of their fortunes to fund this project? Uh huh....not gonna happen. So then what? We take the money whether they like it or not through taxation or penalties or some other such method. This has been tried time and time again. They will simply hire accountants and lawyers to find a way around it and the middle class guy - who can't afford to hire the fancy accountants and lawyers - gets stuck with the bill.
So what to do? Why not try investing some of that $50B into finding ways of making coal safer to use and less harmful to the environment?
"Got it right?" Both created some temporary, unsustainable benefit but left disastrous consequences that we're still experiencing today. They're the people who cooked the goose that laid the golden eggs, and you're saying "Mmm mmm that goose sure was tasty! Cooking it was the right thing to do!"
No, Thatcher and Reagan got it the most wrong of all. Not as wrong as Mao, but incredibly wrong by Western standards.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
No, Thatcher and Reagan got it the most wrong of all. Not as wrong as Mao, but incredibly wrong by liberal standards.
Fixed that for you. You seem to assume that your liberal leanings are Western standards. Not.
Cheers,
Dave
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
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.
Haters need a daily Five Minutes of Hate as part of a balanced diet.
Reggie's deregulation of the banking industry directly lead to the subprime lending bullshit that caused the housing bubble and subsequent collapse.
He's pretty much the worst president in living memory as far as economics goes, made all the worse by the juvenile economics fantasy he propagated managing to take root among the undereducated like MRSA in an AIDS ward.
Also, Dave, you don't need to sign your messages. You may be confused and think you're writing a letter, but you aren't. The system signs things for you.
The Chinese don't allow private ownership in the energy, transportation, telecoms, and banking sector. They seem to be doing just fine.
That Conservative government used centralized planning to win the war remember?
But CAMRA understood urban warfare better than Arthur Scargill
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
1. buy coal industry for 50 giga$
2. new coal companies form
3. new coal companies use eminent domain to buy your land for significantly less than 50 giga$
???
I already don't use any coal-generated electricity, thanks. Took that step a dozen or more years ago.
Somehow it has not resulted in the shutdown of any coal mines. Go figure! Something about supply and demand and cost interrelationships.
Or, to put it another way, infinitesimally reducing demand isn't really in any way equivalent to infinitesimally contributing to a blockade of supply.
Just buy it from China then. I hear the Germans have a lovely natural gas deal with the Russians too.
They are talking about shutting down an order of magnitude more coal plants. Four nuclear reactors is not going to cut it.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
TFA claims that coal causes $100-500 billion in damage per year. If that is the case, and I don't know if it is, then pass that cost on to the coal industry. Basic economics states that externalities cause a free market to be inefficient, so why aren't we internalizing the externalities?
Those European conservatives are left wing in the US.
You know, if they did targeted purchases of older, dirtier plants and got them shut down, it'd probably have a decent effect for the given investment.
There are a bunch of dirty holdout plants that aren't upgrading, it seems like they'd be easy targets.
Solar versus nuclear: a question of scale. Further comments go into detail about resources and areas.
Read about Germany for an idea of what $50 billion will buy in terms of renewables--that is a drop in the bucket of their expenditures. Despite having been at it for more than a decade, they have little to show for it except skyrocketing electricity prices. Replacing fossil fuels with solar is an expensive fantasy.
nope. Very little coal into making Aluminum in the US.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The reason is that energy will move over to Nat Gas, or even oil. Worse, if we do this just in the us, it will do even more damage to American manufacturing than what the neo-cons did with their tax schemes.
Instead, put a tax on ALL LOCALLY CONSUMED GOODS (locally produced as well as imported) and their subparts. It would be based on the CO2/$GDP. In addition, base it on REAL values of CO2 and not guesses. Measure CO2 in and out of nations/states.
With this approach, it rewards those that have low CO2/$GDP emissions, while having those with high CO2/$GDP pay a lot more, discouraging good from there (basically, you make them pay for their CO2). Interestingly, most 3rd world nations would pay little to no taxes. That would not be true for the oil producers since many of those purposely overlook an environmental regs, esp. those ran by dictators.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
admit a conservative like Thatcher was right.
I've been a "left wing greenie" since the 70's, my 80yo parents are both life long "war baby" conservatives who grew up under Winston Chuchill, I love my elderly parents, I don't agree with everything they say but that doesn't make me hate them? I'm also old enough to clearly remember the 70's and 80's and I think you are correct, Thatcher deserves credit for pulling the UK out of a bad financial position, even though her methods polarized the political landscape. It should also be noted that "trickle down economics" has also ultimately been discredited by the recent GFC but you can hardly blame Thatcher and Reagan for the extremes of deregulation implemented by others that followed their tenure. For example, here in Oz it was the left wing treasurer and later PM (Paul Keating) who pushed for deregulating the banks.
Having said that, Thatcher, Reagan and Malcom Fraser (Australia's late 70's, conservative PM) were not even the same species as GWB, Palin, and Tony Abbot (current Oz PM). For example Thatcher was the first world leader to publically acknowledge AGW is a problem and Reagan personally sought and obtained an international cap and trade treaty on sulphur emissions that has been very successful in curbing acid rain. I suspect Reagan was taking his cues from Thatcher on the acid rain thing since she had read chemistry at Oxford before becoming involved in politics. Fraser's "radical" policy on refugees was closer to today's green party policy than it is to either of the majors who currently are so close to each other that the only meaningful debate on the subject is which third world nation should host our immigration gulags..
Hate parades Aside from the fact that ALL leaders make good and bad decisions, celebrating the death of anyone pretty much makes you a douchebag in my opinion. Headlines such as "Ding, dong, the witch is dead" were a low point even by the UK's notoriously low tabloid "standards". Far right conservatives flying an upside down flag after Obama's election were equally obscene.
Liberals hate conservatives
The real problem is human nature, ideas and long term results are simply ignored because people pigeon hole others by whatever political colour they wear on the outside. This stereotyping separates people into political "football teams" and you're not suppose to just enjoy a game of football, society expects you to be a one-eyed supporter of a particular team. GWB summed up that attitude succinctly with the infamous words addressed to the entire planet - "You're either with us or against us". That anti-human attitude, wherever it raises it's ugly head, is what I "hate" about politics.
Disclaimer: I don't claim to be anymore immune to the tribal nature of humans than anyone else on the planet, however just being aware of it's existence does make one stop and think every now and then.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Yes. You can. But most people buy stock, shares in BHP Billiton, Vale, Xstrata, Rio Tinto, Asarco.... buying rights to hundreds of thousands of acres at a time.
Gently reply
Even ignoring the economic silliness of it all, if it were possible they'd celebrate by freezing in the dark. But at least their last breath would be pristine! Fools.
Right Here. Interesting read. Yeah, yeah, causation, correlation, but still an interesting read.
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our liberal leanings are _Civilized_ standards.
Read your sig, btw. Liberty is economic security. If you lack economic security you'll do whatever the guy with money tells you to do. Sooner or later you'll get hungry enough. You'll break. Everyone does. Hunger and poverty make animals out of us all...
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British Steel, like American Steel, couldn't compete with slave labor. Heck, I shouldn't call them slaves. You _own_ a slave, so you at least try to keep it running. Chinese Workers have even less value.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
The industry execs are all worrying that their licenses and permits to mine will remain unused and the coal will lie in the ground as customers switch to cleaner and more economical fuels.
These industry execs are trying to figure out ways of cashing out now rather then suffering the slow decline. Sort of like the guy trying to sell you his house just before the city condemns it for the new freeway off-ramp. And it wouldn't surprise me if they (industry) put these so-called environmentalists up to the task of rounding up some public money to fund the golden parachutes.
Have gnu, will travel.
...because how are you going to run a blast furnace without coal?
A tiny amount of coal (as these things go) mined in the U.S. is used to produce steel in the U.S. these days (about 1% of the billion tons mined annually).
That's needed even to recycle iron and steel.
No it isn't. That would contaminate perfectly good steel. They use electric arc furnaces for that.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Thatcher and Reagan put their ideas into operation and both countries benefited.
Yeah, the price of cocaine went way down. As to who benefited, some people did, but I don't know any of them. I read about them in the gossip columns, sure, but few benefits ever trickled down our backs.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
> Thatcher and Reagan who got it right
10+ unemployment in the UK and stagflation in the US and both governments going into debt. They certainly didn't get it right.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
You know who killed Thoruim? That guy in Dr. Strangelove, when he said "Cobalt Thorium G" his vocal delivery of Thooorium made it irredeemably eeevil in the popular psyche.
The labor government before her was economically stupid. The Thatcher government was both economically and socially stupid.
Nothing much was going on with the post Thatcher government.
Blair's government was a significant improvement, but he screwed the pooch at the end by siding with Bush.
It was all down hill from there.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Norway
And now to act on this idea.
Reagan got it right? Remember Trickle Down Economics? Middle class wages have been stagnant ever since and we continue to struggle with deficits partly due to Reagan's "right" policies. Something has been trickling down, but it's not wealth and prosperity.
Tired of being "punished" by the Slashdot $rtbl since 2002. I'm now over at http://soylentnews.org/ .
It's still relevant because people are still trying to copy her worst mistakes - even the ones she corrected herself later and made a success out of doing the opposite.
Also using an oil boom to finance a change from a manufacturing economy to a financial services economy is seen by some as her greatest success and by some a dismal failure that the UK economy still has not recovered from.
She sold the farm. She got something for it, but years later people all over the world are still arguing if it was worth it or not.
When your manufacturing industry shuts down you end up with far more coal mines becoming uneconomic. That's what happened with most of the ones under Thatcher.
Very much so, in fact so naive that it shows no understanding that steelmaking uses coal for chemical instead of thermal means.
You can't make steel with just iron ore and an electric arc furnace. You need a source of carbon and a reducing agent.
1. Create a tax on coal and coal-based power generation designed to collect the $50 billion.
2. After revenue collected, begin the buyout and shutdown program.
HOWEVER, my suspicion is --- buyout a few companies, and the rest will become more expensive.
Buy out them all, and the CITIZENS will pay the price, as energy bills skyrocket.
To address your siderant...
****TL;DR Drought. Desertification. The kind that won't stop until the remnants of humanity are only at the Arctic circle by 2100.
My parent post is precisely the kind of mindset I had until sometime last year when I researched this more in-depth. I think this is ultimately why first-world citizens are still ambivalent to climate change: we don't appreciate the potential magnitude of what's going to happen.
So the planet warms a few degrees and some cuddly animals go extinct, maybe even lose some ocean-front property, why should I care?
When I looked at the latest papers myself, I was shocked. The models and predictions have way more confidence than they used to, but scientists simply aren't framing the results at all for the public anymore. (This is understandable due to the fear of stirring up political backlash, but it means the public at large is becoming more and more desensitized to the biggest threat to our species) [Keep in mind that climate change nearly wiped us out 100,000 years ago. Did you know that we all come from roughly 100 surviving humans who holed up in a beach-front cave in South Africa?]
As the Hadley cells expand, the deserts near the equator will grow in size, and the temperate zones will constantly shift North. How much they grow depends fully on what we (and by we I mean China and India) do RIGHT NOW (and by right now, I really mean ten years ago, not ten years from now). If we (again, humanity as a whole, the US makes almost no impact from here on out **except by leading by example**) continue to exponentially grow our coal industry at full steam for the next few decades, then the areas in extreme drought (think worse than the US dust bowl) will basically cover the entire planet by 2100.
Comparing our current CO2 ppm to the dinosaur era isn't accurate enough to spell out our future (I wish it were). Never before has CO2 concentration increased this quickly in such a short period of time. The climate changed gradually over millions of years in the dinosaur era. Biodiversity can easily morph on a planet-wide scale on that time period. Here, we've done that same ppm transition in roughly a century, and with our exponential growth, we're likely to nearly *double* our current concentration in another 50 years. That concentration alone is unprecedented in our planet's entire history, let alone the impossibly short time scale that we'll achieve it in.
Once we appreciate that history has no lessons for our new unchartered territory, we look long and hard at the best simulations we've made to date, which take into account the continents' shapes and locations (which are extremely different from Pangea, I might add), and you find a very grim story: The ocean loses its ability to carbon-sink, the permafrost begins melting and emitting methane, and you have accelerated warming even without anymore added help from us. The result is a disruption of all jet-streams to the point where every year looks different from the previous. Very wet to very dry. Hot to cold. Our existing breadbaskets simply can not handle this level of volatility. Massive crop failure will become the "new normal," and the world's impoverished will be ravaged with famine. Famine is the biggest driver of civil unrest, which probably means many third world countries will simply cease to exist as they degrade into permanent chaos. Almost half of the entire world will become malnourished. This is to say nothing about how the extreme droughts will affect water scarcity, which is already considered the world's biggest risk in terms of likeliness and impact by the World Economic Forum. Water scarcity won't hit the world as hard in more developed regions, because we will burn more energy (like oil, natural gas, and coal...and yes, **eventually** solar power) to desalinate water.
That's the first whammy to humanity. As time marches on, you'll then find the steady desertifcation I mentioned above (Google 'future drought map' and just look at tho
AccountKiller
Because people being out of jobs is the really important thing when you have to decide between fucking up the planet or not fucking up the planet, yes?
Funny how /. has multiple personalities. When it comes to the MPAA and RIAA, we keep telling them that analogy with the car replacing the horse carriage and to move with the times.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Ah yes, the old "burning down cottages" myth. Apparently they faked the moon landings too.
It's pathetic that you would even dare to compare Thatcher to Stalin.
It's no wonder why you people now live under an oppressive surveillance state.
Run, unsurprisingly, by the heirs of Thatcher.
There's a difference? I don't think a subset of Americans (as in "Estadounidense") is enough to offset the average, no matter how special they think they are.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Yea, that's for people with money.
I'm just looking to live in a shack for $5. An acre is plenty for me.
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
Found the link to the article I referenced (not sure why I couldn't find it in my browser history before):
Shale Oil & Gas: Not a Revolution But a Retirement Party
(It's a rather depressing read, actually.)
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Socialists are very good at spending other people's money, aren't they edjs.
Unlike the moon landings, it was possible to take a short drive and see the burnt out cottage for yourself. I'm pretty sure they were burned down.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
As a self professed 'eco-idiot' :) , molten salt thorium reactors do indeed hold promise. But like renewable energy 'storage' the tech isn't there right now to replace coal. It's a chemical engineering problem to make sure you can contain the highly corrosive salts for 20+ years without any maintenance. Not yet solved, but likely quite solvable.
But not there yet as I said.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
It is amazing that in all their glee the environMentalists mentioned in this story forgot about the actual customers who are using the power the coal plants are producing. In case people have missed it, a huge amount of America is powered by coal plants and would need to be put on some other type of power. We are a bit limited at this point in time if sci-fi authors are to be believed for how power is produced in the future.
Agrisea Tsunami - Epyc Servers... https://agrisea.net/products
Wow, do the Environmentalists actually have fifty gigabucks? Oh... I suppose they are wanting someone else to pay for it.
Couldn't we just use that $50B to improve efficiency across the US? Upgrade plants and transmission lines. Replace older appliances like fridges, air conditioners, water heaters. Change out windows and doors while adding insulation. I feel like that would be just as helpful and probably cost less than buying all the coal.
It was the insinuation of who burned them down that I was referring to. Tinfoil hats sell well in your area?
Yes. I made that bit up for comedic effect. But with all the other stuff that has come out over time, I wouldn't be surprised.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
The only real way to get rid of coal is coming up with a cheaper replacement.
You might even get away with banning coal in a few developed countries, but if you care about climate change, this will solve nothing.
If China and India alone are allowed to continue with their insatiable consumption of coal, they would offset any reduction in coal consumption in North America and Europe in a decade or so.
Until we acknowledge that solar and wind aren't a credible solution to replace even 50% of coal and natural gas consumption, we can't begin to focus on the real solution.
The only greenhouse gas free solution to replace coal is nuclear.
Nuclear doesn't have to be expensive. It's expensive in the USA and most of Europe because:
- The local nuclear regulatory agencies are being lead by people with the hidden mandate of making nuclear as expensive as possible
- An extremely vocal minority want to get rid of all nuclear power, immediately
- the extremely low volume of new nuclear reactor installations make current technology even more expensive
- the custom of making tiny changes to new nuclear power plants every few years, preventing standardization
- new nuclear research is based on an assumption that current nuclear isn't safe enough (when it actually is plenty safe, there has been zero Generation III nuclear power plant accidents)
- current nuclear technology (light water, solid fuel) are safe because of the plethora of expensive systems used to make it safe
There are nuclear designs that are safe because its designed to be safe (using gravity, chemically stable coolants, the advantage of having the nuclear fuel dissolved with the coolant), yet that tech has been banned for 40 years since it doesn't produce plutonium for nuclear bombs, that tech avoids the vast majority of all expensive safety systems, being walk away safe
I don't love nuclear, I'm just really scared of climate change, and the "let's pretend we're solving it with solar+wind initiative" has gone too far already.
They could move to Detroit (pronounced DEE- troit by hillbillies) where there's lots of roads, rail lines, empty factories and houses, and build wind turbines and solar panels.
Sure beats going into a hole in the ground to dig coal.
Amen!
So speaks the 1%, or the 1% wanna' be. Did we forget the 11 times Reagan raised taxes or how high he ran up the nation debt or how he declared open season on workers by crushing PATCO -and middle-class wages have stagnated ever since regardless of how productive the workers become or how much profit corporations rake in?
I don't get it. you are saying they are doing a terrible job of managing their wealth when they are still ahead of their national debt - yet just about every other western country is in massive debit?
Last I heard, the US clock has something like 17 trillion dollars debit - that's zeroes on it I don't even know what to call it - but it's about 58000 per person in the US (based on about 300 million pop.)
My country is doing it's damnedest to imitate that too, but we still have a ways to go before we rack up that much debit per person.
I'd say compared to that, Norway's looking pretty good! - they still rank in the top 10 of the best places in the world to live. (actually #1 on the list I saw)
Yes, socialism works very well indeed until the money runs out, which it inevitably does and will in Norway's case as well. To say Norway is doing splendidly well because it's ploughing through its savings, compared to other countries, is to miss the point.
Don't confuse British conservatism with US conservatism. They are not the same things at all.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
> Coal today is just as clean as other forms of energy when you factor in all the externalities.
No, no it isn't. Coal is far dirtier -- even modern scrubbed plants (of which most aren't) emit mercury and other heavy metals, and SO2. Less than they used to, but more than gas, hydro, wind, nuclear, and solar, which emit none. Both gas and coal emit NOx (the others don't). Extracting coal from the ground is horribly messy -- just ask the good folks who like to drink water in West Virginia. Storing the coal waste is also horribly messy -- just ask the good folks who live along the Dan River in North Carolina and Virginia. Oh, and then there's those pesky CO2 emissions. Coal emits twice as much CO2 as gas per MWh, and of course hydro, nuclear, wind, and solar emit zero or virtually zero.
Coal is far, far dirtier than gas. Coal emits twice the CO2 as gas. In terms of environmental damage, the power plants aren't the same merely because they all have downsides.
> The environmentalists need to learn to quit when they achieve "good enough".
I suspect that they know to quit when they achieve good enough. After all, being an environmentalist is hard work -- the pay sucks if you're even lucky enough to get paid to do it. You're up against deep pockets all the time. The environmentalists won't quit until CO2 emissions are down 80%, and that won't happen so long as we're getting any electricity from coal.
Support a few technologists in Washington.
Yes.
So, your conservatives are a bunch of lightweights? Or didn't really, really hate Stalin in the way that Thatcher was hated in Britain.
I know : I was involved in organising our local ones. And I'm proud of it.
Dig the bitch up, so that we can burn her again. Unfortunately - and quite sensibly - they ashed the bitch and have hidden the ashes.
I hope that her son gets the jail time that he deserves for trying to make his own private countries in Africa.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Like the jokes "It wasn't more than 10 minutes after Maggie Thatcher went down to hell, that she closed down five furnaces to reduce capacity and the devils went on strike".
"Just think what trade with the daleks would do for the British electronics industry"
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
the global coal market produced over $800 billion (USD) of coal last year; need we say any more about the stupidity and naivety of this article? no one is going to sell that which is worth tens of trillions for a mere $50 billion
But then if there is no more coal, the environmentalists won't be able to blog on the internet about coal's evils, as it will be no longer powering their city and therefore their laptops.