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

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.

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: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)

Re:This is more than a little bit naive.

[OakDragon]

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?

I picture vast fields of hipsters pedaling bolted-down fixies with generators attached.

Re:This is more than a little bit naive.

[rnturn]

``Article is ignorant of how the coal industry works.''

I suspect the authors are totally aware of how the coal industry works. That's what they're trying to fix. Like you, I didn't take the time to read the whole article (maybe later) but I was appalled when I had to fly over West Virgina years ago and saw the damage to the forests (take the trip in a small plane so you can see the effects close up) that acid rain and the beginnings of mountaintop removal was causing. It makes you sick to see it and it's only gotten worse. I have to wonder if the metallurgical need for coal couldn't be satisfied by some of the extraction methods that are less destructive to the environment. Mining will always be messy but is something like mountaintop removal really necessary? If we think it's okay to take a huge area and render it uninhabitable by human beings -- like what's happening to parts of Appalachia -- then I guess we'll all get what we deserve. All in the name of cheap power. (And I don't know about you but my electric power rates go up -- never down -- every year regardless of the amount of coal that we're clawing out of the ground.) Then do we use the $50B to relocate all the people in Appalachia to other parts of the country where they won't be poisoned? That won't work either.

Personally, I'd like to see coal powered plants disappear as fast as humanly possible. Unfortunately, until we can create a critical mass of renewable power that can be intelligently shuffled around to meet local demands, we're kind of stuck with it. Unless we can work up the political will to take the first (and second) steps. The coal industry would like that to never happen.

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.