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.

Comments

Yes, but will it be chap 11?

[WindBourne]

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.

Re:Yes, but will it be chap 11?

[adolf]

Coal began being replaced by natural gas as it got cheap because of fracking.

Natural gas fracking expansions got ruined because of OPEC dumping crude.

Now the coal suppliers have begun to fail, as the natural gas suppliers have begun to stop expanding.

If OPEC (or Saudi Arabia -- whoever) doesn't stop dumping crude oil onto the market, natural gas suppliers will fail next.

It's a vicious cycle, this, at it eats its young.

But gas is still hovering around $2.00 per gallon stateside and home heating bills are down, so nobody cares...yet.

Re:Yes, but will it be chap 11?

[Stephan Schulz]

We can use the Fischer-Tropsch process to convert the coal to more usable forms. We aren't going to just let all those delicious hydrocarbons go to waste.

The Fischer-Tropsch process can turn coal into liquid hydrocarbons, but it is not energy efficient. Its feedstocks are hydrogen (currently mostly produced at a loss from methane, i.e. natural gas) and carbon monoxide (produced from the coal). If you have the Hydrogen, you can just use it directly, e.g. in a fuel cell, and burn the coal for electricity or heat. The Fischer-Tropsch process is only interesting if you need liquid fuels, say for operating tanks or aircraft, and don't have more efficient sources.

Re:Yes, but will it be chap 11?

[C0R1D4N]

We should have been investing in Nuclear, seeing as uranium is found mostly in more developed nations and not places filled with psychos and sheiks.

Re:Yes, but will it be chap 11?

[rtb61]

This story is nothing to do with energy or coal but all about fiscal shenanigans. Track the debt and all other fiscal manipulations and you will likely see the big banks fingerprints all over this either directly or indirectly. Run up debts, pay to much for capital assets, dress it all up and the sell it to pension funds et al and the bet the whole thing will collapse and then buy back those capital assets at a discount, then sell them again at a high price and repeat. You will see this happen again and again and again. The electric car is taking over and fossil fuels days are numbered.

Re:Yes, but will it be chap 11?

[FlyHelicopters]

50 years from now the only people burning hydrocarbons for energy will be die hard nutjobs who put smokestacks on their electric cars so they can "burn coal" at people.

That is easy to type, hard to make happen.

Oh, it might happen in Denmark or Sweden... but world wide?

Not likely...

Most cars will be electric

They will? Maybe... Considering that out of 75 million cars sold last year, 540,000 were plug in of something or other (things like the Prius Plug In Hybid), that is a steep hill to climb.

most electricity will be from wind, solar, tides

How do you plan to store it? Laptop batteries?

The math says that isn't going to happen, the size and scale of the problem far exceed what can be done today.

some exotic source not yet invented, possibly fusion.

Ahh Fusion... in the 80s I was promised Fusion was only 20 years away... now it is 2016 and Fusion is only 20 years away! :)

Re:Yes, but will it be chap 11?

[FlyHelicopters]

We can use the Fischer-Tropsch process to convert the coal to more usable forms. We aren't going to just let all those delicious hydrocarbons go to waste.

Link for anyone interested...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:Yes, but will it be chap 11?

[Harlequin80]

Thermal coal prices have been in the pits for ages. But coking coal prices held up for a long time until the steel market crashed. Currently coking coal is the best way for making steel and if we see a pickup in steel prices then coking coal will recover. Much of the coal that is in the basins mined by peabody in Australia are coking.

Re: Yes, but will it be chap 11?

[Anonymous Coward]

Meanwhile, somebody please explain the 'environmental regulations' that supposedly play a part in this.

I personally wish the administration would regulate some businesses more, especially financial ones, but the truth is they've done very little and yet conservatives love to cite 'regulations' or 'regulatory uncertainty' any time their precious free market fails them since their base is just convinced it must be true even absent any actual examples.

Re:Yes, but will it be chap 11?

[EEPROMS]

accept if you run the numbers that's not possible within the next 20 years. Even with China pumping out insane amounts of solar panels renewable's are hardly making a dent in the market. China, Africa and India's energy consumption growth numbers are just insane, for example just to keep up with china's growth you have to build the whole UK power grid every year.

Re:Yes, but will it be chap 11?

[silentcoder]

It made sense when South Africa used it extensively in the 1980s - it provided a way to get fuel for cars when the world refused to sell it to us. We had coal, we didn't have oil - and nobody would sell it, so we made our own from the coal.

But I would not suggest the US implements vast-scale segregation and human-rights abuses in order to create a new market for coal... though if the company's asked nicely I'm sure Trump would consider it.

Re:Yes, but will it be chap 11?

[ThatsNotPudding]

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).

Leaving behind shoddy dams brimming with coal ash, chocked full of heavy metals to leach into the ground and water ways

But don't worry; the taxpayers will always be there to foot the bill, so the former coal and power millionaire CEOs can sleep worry-free in their mansions.

Re: Yes, but will it be chap 11?

[gurps_npc]

Basically it works like this.

Coal itself is relatively cheap, mainly because it is a lot easier to transport - you can do it in trucks, not pipelines.

The EPA has had reasonable restrictions on what any new coal plants can burn (does not affect old plants). They can't emit more than 1100 pounds per megawatt hour . Note, this compares with a 1000 lbs limit for natural gas plants.

But to make a power plant that emits 10% more than natural gas plants emit, means the coal power plant costs so much money to run that it isn't worthwhile (compared to natural gas plants).

If you remove that limitation, then new coal plants could be created, creating new demand for coal. This is the regulation they are complaining about.

Yes, this regulation is clearly a good one, obviously MORE than fair, but if someone was stupid enough to eliminate that rule, someone might make more of a profit selling coal.

Also, regulatory uncertainty is caused by the fact that sane people keep trying to apply this fair rule to EXISTING coal plants, not just the new ones.

Re:Yes, but will it be chap 11?

[bluefoxlucid]

That will happen when the human labor involved is lower.

It's a difficult problem: when you have a more expensive technology, that technology requires more human labor. This holds true at higher demands; low-demand economics are strange, and require understanding of business economics of risk. Energy is *the* high-demand product, so we can assume any energy technology is necessarily high-demand: if it's cheaper than modern methods, everybody wants it.

In short: Nuclear competes with Coal; Nuclear will replace Coal practically overnight when the combined cost of transitioning to Nuclear is cheaper than the un-sunk costs of maintaining a coal plant. (The resulting slow transition is a good thing, generally, unless you want to see the Great Depression first-hand.)

If we move early by brute force, two things happen. First, the more labor-intensive technology requires a bigger chunk of the population, thus more wages (and taxes and shit) for the product (electricity), thus depriving that labor from producing other things. Second, the cost of paying all those wages raises the price of the product, and the consumer finds themselves with less remaining buying power, thus cannot buy other products and support the labor required to make those products.

In short: we expend the same amount of time and money, but make fewer things. Your paycheck can buy less, and you become poorer. This isn't a matter of inflation or deflation; it's a matter of the sum total of all money buys a sum total of less stuff.

The long and short of that is it creates more poverty and leads to starvation and homelessness, and thus incurs some deaths.

On the other hand, some pundits argue other costs in environmental damage. As well, nobody really talks about the technological and economic debt: we could just keep chugging along as-is, let the tech evolve, then use the cheaper energy tech to put the genie back into the bottle. We could go atmospheric gas to liquid hydrocarbon fertilizer to grow wood to make structures. We could accept a government tax (a cost that has the same poverty-creating impact I cited above) to create a strategic energy reserve by siphoning a small amount of atmospheric carbon into liquid hydrocarbon and pumping it back into the same oil wells we initially emptied.

Long, complex problems. You'll notice a few finance analogies in there if you look hard.

Plastics are about to be a million times cheaper.

[BlueCoder]

Coal is a very cheap hydrocarbon. Very easy and cheap to extract. So it's the most ideal resource for processing new plastics from. Once energy production drops from coal expect plastics to be used even more as they will be cheaper. Imagine plastic effused concrete.

We might actually be heading into the true plastics era. You ain't seen nothing yet.

$10 billion debt ?

[swell]

Who in this century had the misplaced wisdom to invest $10B in this coal company? How is it possible to be so blind to the changing tide in the energy world? Whatever . . . I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell them if you can find these investors for me.

Renewable Energy in the US

[FlyHelicopters]

Since someone will bring it up, might as well be me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Worth a look, the percentage of electricity production in the US by renewables is indeed at an all time high, but not as much as you'd think.

In 1998, it was 11.06% of all electricity produced. In 2015 it was 13.44% of all electricity produced.

Yes, an increase, but it has been mostly Wind and Solar picking up for the loss of hydro. Hydro is down 28% since 1998, while Wind and Solar are up massively.

Overall, the US produced 150 billion KWh more electricity in 2015 than in 1998. Nice, but in real terms, nothing to jump up and down about.

CO2 levels in the air are past 400 PPM, in order to get them to stop climbing and actually FALL, will require efforts far beyond all this in a timeframe that is highly unlikely to happen.

http://400.350.org/

The safe level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is 350 parts per million. The only way to get there is to immediately transition the global economy away from fossil fuels and into into renewable energy, energy efficiency, and sustainable farming practices.

The primary problem with this is that what would be required to do it may well start WWIII and lead to massive revolts worldwide. The math just isn't there.

In many ways, the time to change direction was 30 years ago. The ship has sailed, so we now must prepare for the future that is so clearly coming.

http://www.globalwarming.org/2...

But as Newsweekreporter Sharon Begley points out, just to limit atmospheric concentrations to 450 ppm, nations would have to build 10,000 new nuclear power plantsâ"one every other day from now until 2050â"plus a mind boggling 1 million solar roof top panels per day from now until 2050. Even then, 450 ppm is attainable only if global energy efficiency improves by a whopping 500%, population grows only to 9 billion (instead of 10 billion or 11 billion), and global GDP grows at an anemic (near recession) rate of 1.6% per year.

The problem with people like the 350.org group is that they encourage action without saying how MUCH of that action would be required.

What would it take to lower CO2 concentrations to 350 ppm? According to Begleyâ(TM)s source, Cal Tech chemist Nathan Lewis, global CO2 emissions would have to drop to zero by 2050.

Absent revolutionary changes in energy production, distribution, conversion, and storageâ"Nobel-caliber breakthroughs that nobody can plan or predictâ"lowering CO2 emissions to 350 ppm is impossible without draconian cutbacks in population, economic output, or both. Whether they realize it or not, the Climate 350 Club is asking us to go back to the caves.

In other words, there is ZERO chance of this happening...

So we need to prepare for a world of 500 PPM CO2, and frankly should prepare for 600 PPM, since 500 PPM will sail right on by and I doubt we'll stop before 600 PPM either...

Do we have the Green Tech we need?

[FlyHelicopters]

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.

---

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

Re:Cheap natural gas and expensive regulations...

[WindBourne]

What is funny is that none of the Obama regulations has had ANY impact on coal plants, other than stopping new ones from being done. All of the closing are for 2 reasons:
1) cheap nat gas, combined with cheap wind. Wind is MUCH cheaper than coal. In fact, I think that it is wrong to subsidize it anymore, but CONgress likes to waste money.
2) W's regulation of requiring that coal plants emit NO MERCURY by 2016 was huge. Per the bill, they could get an extension of like 1-2 years, but only if they were putting in place controls, OR building a replacement plant. As such, that is why we are at 30% or less THIS year, and will be around 15-20% in another 2 years. At that time, 1/2 of the coal plants will close and be replaced, by either wind or nat gas.

Re:Plastics are about to be a million times cheape

[FlyHelicopters]

Oil and natural gas won't be cheap forever...

The smart play is to develop factories that can take all three as a feedstock, so that you don't care which one is on top in any given year...

How is this 'hardware'?

[oneiros27]

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.

Re:Plastics are about to be a million times cheape

[WindBourne]

TOTALLY agree with you about that being the smart thing. I doubt it will happen. :)
However, if we quit burning oil/nat gas, then our usage will be below 20% of what it is today. IOW, oil/nat gas will remain cheap for many decades, if not centuries. Still good to have alternatives.

Re:Cheap natural gas and expensive regulations...

[FlyHelicopters]

Wind is MUCH cheaper than coal.

I keep seeing people say this, do you have a source?

In Texas (the leader in Wind in the US), we have the choice to buy power from many different companies, and can choose the source for our power.

If I buy coal power for my office, my price is just over 7 cents per KWh. Wind? 10 cents per KWh.

Re:Cheap natural gas and expensive regulations...

[Smidge204]

https://www.eia.gov/forecasts/...

Levelized cost, which includes the cost of building, operating, maintaining and decommissioning the facility.

This may not bear any sensible correlation to the price your utility charges you, depending on how dickish they feel that can get away with being.
=Smidge=

Re:Plastics are about to be a million times cheape

[rahvin112]

Imagine plastic effused concrete.

I have a hard time fitting plastic into effused concrete. Concrete is poured all the time. Though I think you meant infused, in which case I'd rather not as I can imagine it would result in death of significant numbers of people. Plastic infused concrete would likely offer no benefits and significant problems. Without some special plastics the results would be plastic that wasn't bonded into the concrete where the strength of concrete is from the bonding that forms. Now if you could construct it like fiberglass where it was stranded and had sufficient angular surfaces that the concrete could hold onto the plastic you might have something but I doubt it. Fiberglass reinforced concrete trades compressive strength for flexibility and additional tensile strength. Plastic infused concrete would likely weaken compressive strength and tensile strength while providing no actual improvement. Honestly if there was any benefit to such a combination it would already exist because plastic is already dirt cheap. Some plastics are already significantly cheaper per volume than aggregate.

Even if coal was free it wouldn't significantly lower the cost of plastics because the additional processing steps would more than compensate for the cost of the base materials. Most plastic is made from very light hydrocarbons (gasoline and lighter). To use coal for plastic production you would need to refine the coal and frack off lighter hydrocarbons, this would be extremely energy and process intensive. Probably on the order of the Fischer-Tropsch process, which is wickedly inefficient, and then throw on a bunch of sub-processes and you'd even still need a hydrogen source like natural gas. We won't be making plastic from coal until every drop of oil is used up.

Falling Chinese Coal Consumption Undermines Market

[Layzej]

Ok. How about the Wall Street Journal? Falling Chinese Coal Consumption and Output Undermine Global Market

Both coal production and consumption peaked in 2013 and has dropped continuously, falling a further 3.7% in the first 11 months of 2015 compared to the same period the year before. Both coal production and consumption peaked in 2013 and has dropped continuously, falling a further 3.7% in the first 11 months of 2015 compared to the same period the year before.

The central government has curbed construction of new coal fired plants with national regulators ordering in April 2016 a halt to construction in 13 provinces and delays for already approved projects in a further 15 provinces.[5] This is in line with a moratorium issued by the National Energy Agency in 2015 banning new coal mines in China for a period of three years and closure of thousands of small coal mines. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:Wish I could do that...

[Harlequin80]

Because in Australia Peabody formed an equity partnership with Mitsui & Co, a japanese energy company, and Thiess Holdings an Australian domestic civil and mining contractor. As a result the Australian operations are not 100% owned by peabody and hence have to be treated as separate entities. Peabody's ownership of those operations will be represented as an asset in shares on the parent companies books. They could potentially be forced to divest some of those shares but that should not affect Australian operations.

Re:Cheap natural gas and expensive regulations...

[mspohr]

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

Re:Plastics are about to be a million times cheape

[jandersen]

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.

Re:Cheap natural gas and expensive regulations...

[Smidge204]

To provide battery backup of 14 days to the whole planet

What the fuckity fuck kind of absurdity is this? If the wind stops blowing and the sun stops shining and the waters stop flowing everywhere on the planet for two weeks straight we all have MUCH BIGGER PROBLEMS to worry about.

Winds are forecastable and, amazingly, wind farms tend to be built where the winds are fairly consistent. It's almost like that consider this when planning them.

Chemical batteries aren't the only tool we have for storing power, either. Pumped hydro, compressed air, hydrogen, thermal storage, magnetic storage and flywheels are all viable options depending on the specific requirements and all of them have been scaled up to utility grade storage facilities... and storage is nowhere near as critical for renewable energy as everyone seems to think.

And that also would require replacing and redesigning much of the world's power grids.

No, it wouldn't.
=Smidge=

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Re:Plastics are about to be a million times cheape

[silentcoder]

There is a longer-term risk to plastics we don't usually consider (because it's *very* long term ?) but it is worth thinking about maybe. The last time there was such an abundance of a molecule that nothing could break down it was lignin. Lignin being the key molecule that allowed plants to form wood and grow into trees. For quite some time there was nothing that could break down lignin - the era is what we now call the carboniferous. The presence of that molecule in abundance had interesting effects on nature. Firstly - a lot of carbon did not get broken down into CO2 when trees died, so it ended up being trapped and forming the fossil fuels we're now burning (interesting how the new unbreakable molecule is made from the results of the old one). In the meantime those trees produced oxygen but because they didn't decompose nothing balanced that out. The earth's oxygen content jumped to 40% - the highest it has been in it's entire history.

In that environment a lot of things that can't grow very big due to inefficient lungs grew gigantic. There was a dragonfly with a 1m wingspan, the largest known arachnid of all time - which had a jaw almost 90cm long (we have no complete fossils but it's estimated to have been well over 3m from head to tail - nothing like that could live today).

And when eventually things DID evolve that could break down lignin... in a very short time, all those creatures went extinct.

Imagine if the results of something evolving that can break down plastics - is actually worse for us than the plastic dumping was... it's entirely possible and the simple fact is that if we keep putting plastic everywhere - things WILL evolve that can eat it. Sooner or later.

liberals aren't normally so clear. Doesn't work

[raymorris]

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.

Minimum Wage

[DarthVain]

Not to mention the total subsidy of all industry for lower wages on the backs of social programs. A few wealthy make more profit from a cheaper workforce where the entire tax base pays for the social programs required for all those people that can't live on the wages the receive. Pension and cleanup obligations are a drop in the bucket compared to this systemic problem.

Walmart is the poster child of this issue for not only an example of the above but apparently profiting even more from accepting the most food stamps as well. Probably expressed as a Win-Win in the exec boardroom...

Re:Plastics are about to be a million times cheape

[angel'o'sphere]

No ide how that got "insightful"

Coal is not a hydrocarbon, coal is carbon

No way to make any plastics from it unless you convert it with some hydrogen source into "hydrocarbons".