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World's Largest Private Coal Company Files For Bankruptcy (reuters.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Peabody Energy Corp filed for U.S. bankruptcy protection on Wednesday after a sharp drop in coal prices left it unable to service debt of $10.1 billion, much of it incurred for an expansion into Australia. As demand for metallurgical coal fell, particularly in China, Peabody's financial woes intensified. The company took a $700 million write-down on its Australian metallurgical coal assets last year. At home, the U.S. shale boom of the past few years made natural gas competitive with thermal coal, and the Obama administration's environmental regulations raised operational costs. Mr. Peabody's coal train might not be hauling away any more of paradise. Peabody, the world's biggest private-sector coal producer, said it expected its mines to continue to operate as usual and said its Australian assets were excluded from the bankruptcy. "This process enables us to strengthen liquidity and reduce debt, build upon the significant operational achievements we've made in recent years and lay the foundation for long-term stability and success in the future," Peabody Chief Executive Officer Glenn Kellow said in a statement.
Most of these are going in as chap 11. IOW, they are simply dropping their debt and then being allowed to go back to mining coal. Yet, the real issue is that the coal burning plants are closing left, right, and sideways. Last year, Coal accounted for around 30% of America's electricity. And at this rate of dropping, coal will account for about 15-20% in another 2 years (they expect about 1/2 of the plants to close over the next 2 years).
So, unless these companies are jumping on other mining ventures, OR they are developing uses for coal, then these will be bankrupt in another 3-5 years. So, society is being stuck with these loses over and over.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
http://www.newsweek.com/begley...
The irony is that the above was written in 2009, when CO2 levels were 386 PPM, now they have passed 400 PPM and show no signs of stopping.
Two viewpoints:
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which assesses the causes, magnitude and impacts of global warming, said in 2007 that "currently available" technologies and those on the cusp of commercialization can bring enough zero-carbon energy online to avoid catastrophic climate change. And I regularly get reports from renewable-energy and environmental groups arguing that off-the-shelf technologies, fully deployed, can get us there.
And on the other side:
In the opposite corner is the Department of Energy, which in December concluded that we need breakthroughs in physics and chemistry that are "beyond our present reach" to, for instance, triple the efficiency of solar panels; DOE secretary Steven Chu has said we need Nobel caliber breakthroughs.
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In short:
That is also the view of energy chemist Nate Lewis of the California Institute of Technology. "It's not true that all the technologies are available and we just need the political will to deploy them," he says. "My concern, and that of most scientists working on energy, is that we are not anywhere close to where we need to be. We are too focused on cutting emissions 20 percent by 2020â"but you can always shave 20 percent off" through, say, efficiency and conservation. By focusing on easy, near-term cuts, we may miss the boat on what's needed by 2050, when CO2 emissions will have to be 80 percent below today's to keep atmospheric levels no higher than 450 parts per million.
Worth noting is that 450 PPM is 100 PPM higher than the Club 350 people want to keep it at and say is the "safe level".
So is that possible? Here is a 12 step program from someone who says it could be done. And perhaps in a fantasy world, it could. Most of this list is completely silly stuff.
http://sustainabilityadvantage...
1. Mandate net zero energy (NZE) residential and commercial buildings. - Well that sounds nice for new construction, but what do you plan to do with existing buildings? People don't tear down and rebuild stuff every 10 years. This will also raise the price of new buildings making it harder to afford them.
2. Design walkable, bikeable communities - That works for future communities, but not the ones already built. It also really only works for places that have expensive land or are boxed in by mother nature to small areas. In places that have lots of cheap land, it simply makes no economic sense.
3. Stabilize the population - Talk about a political minefield. Go see if the Pope is going to start supporting birth control.
4. Put a price on carbon - You can do this, but in the short term it will just push a billion people into poverty. Do it enough to actually matter and you may end up with riots. You ALSO have to do it world wide, or it doesn't matter.
5. Capture CO2 - This is an easy suggestion to give, I'd like to see the worldwide pricetag for paying for it. Technically possible things are not always affordable.
6. Electrify transportation - Even if you banned gas car production tomorrow, at current car production rates it would take nearly 15 years to replace the gas cars in the world with EVs, and that assumes that people will have the money for them, have a place to charge them, and that power plants can somehow produce enough power for a billion cars cleanly. Since you can't actually ban gas cars tomorrow, you might phase this in over a decade or two, at best, but in reality you're looking at multiple decades before even half the car fleet is EV.
7. Create a national, smart elect
I follow a fair bit of environmental news sources ... but this is only 'news for nerds' in that it's a case of people sitting at home complaining about things that they have little chance of directly affecting.
The sign that this should be off-topic here is that it doesn't have an appropriate category -- it got shoved into 'hardware'. (I could maybe see it under science (climate change) or technology (issues w/ price competition in energy production) ... but how the hell is this 'hardware'?).
Can we get this back to being a tech website again? Keep the articles on topic, and kill the 'Entertainment' category? ... unless of course, it's Star Wars ... or maybe comic book related ... okay, you can keep 'Entertainment', unless we see some post about some reality TV show with non-tech people in it or one of the dozen or so singing shows.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
The problem is that the coal industry is leaving taxpayers with pension obligations and mine cleanup obligations. They will go bankrupt and leave us with the bill.
Remember Capitalism = Privatize Profits and Socialize Losses
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
We might actually be heading into the true plastics era. You ain't seen nothing yet.
I fear you may be right. Burning fossil fuel is bad enough as it is, but at least most of the waste products are going to disappear from the environment relatively quickly, and CO2 is not very poisonous, despite the fact that it causes climate change. Plastics on the other hand consists of entirely new molecules which biology has no response to, so it get broken down very slowly and mostly mechanically, and we are only now beginning to realise that the presence of microscopic fragments of plastinc in the food webs is likely to be a problem - perhaps a big one. And plastics leach other artificial chemicals that have their own, harmful effects; some mimic hormones, for example. It would be somewhat ironic, wouldn't it, if our enthusiasm for this brilliant wonder material ends up more of less sterilising us.
For all that, I'm not against plastics - what I am worried about is the fact that we always seem to rush head first into whatever seems like a good idea at the time, ignoring all calls for caution because that might get in the way of making a quick profit. Why is it that we never learn? Plastics could be - already is, in fact - a hugely valuable material, cheap, strong, light weight, resistant to chemicals etc etc, but we really need to learn to think before we just release new, unknown substances into the environment. Perhaps we actually need something similar to the restrictions on pharmaceuticals - rigorous testing that proves that a new chemical meets certain, strict guidelines for harmfulness, utility and safe mechanisms for their final disposal.
It's been 50 years, isn't it time to stop the political shenanigans and do something the environment now? Handing billions of dollars to democrat campaign contributors while ignoring the stuff that could actually save the planet is getting tiresome.
> 3. Numbers don't matter ...
Liberals normally seem to THINK like that, but they rarely say it so clearly. "So what if it doesn't work, it makes me feel good to pretend".
We're not talking about "it would be hard" or "or would cost a little more". It's impossible, and therefore a huge waste of precious time. So far you guys have wasted 50 years chasing solar-electric, which is one of the most ineffective energy sources ever proposed, next to "pyramid power".
Now if you go down to the hardware store and get an 8" plastic pipe for $12, you can put it outside, connect it to your water line, and have hot water. That works; it works quite well. Since it works, and you can do it yourself for $12, it doesn't involve handing a few billion dollars to Clinton and Gore's campaigning contributors, so they tell you to do that. They tell you to ignore what works and instead give billions to their buddies. You go right ahead and do that, while power continues to come from 80% fossil fuels because you're too busy handing money to political donors rather than using the carbon-free energy technologies that actually work.