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The Cheap Energy Revolution Is Here, and Coal Won't Cut It (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Wind and solar are about to become unstoppable, natural gas and oil production are approaching their peak, and electric cars and batteries for the grid are waiting to take over. This is the world Donald Trump inherited as U.S. president. And yet his energy plan is to cut regulations to resuscitate the one sector that's never coming back: coal. Clean energy installations broke new records worldwide in 2016, and wind and solar are seeing twice as much funding as fossil fuels, according to new data released Tuesday by Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF). That's largely because prices continue to fall. Solar power, for the first time, is becoming the cheapest form of new electricity in the world. But with Trump's deregulations plans, what "we're going to see is the age of plenty -- on steroids," BNEF founder Michael Liebreich said. "That's good news economically, except there's one fly in the ointment, and that's climate."
Coal is dead. Helping coal MINERS makes sense, but trying to resurrect something that is dying because of market forces (and good riddance) is the most retarded incarnation of "conservatism" since trickle down economics.
and coal is going to die, why the worry and fret about coal deregulation (as opposed to subsidies)?
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Trump knows there is no future in coal and it's not coming back. He's basically keeping a campaign promise. People in coal mining country were told by Hillary Clinton what they didn't want to hear, namely that there was no future in coal and, in a much quieter voice that apparently nobody heard, that they'd supposedly be retrained for new jobs. Trump simply told coal miners that their problems were somebody else's fault and he would remove restrictions on coal. In the short term it will probably save enough jobs for the over 50 crowd that they can retire from the mines, but there's no future for younger people in the field and Trump knows it. He's not going to say it out loud as the coal miners prefer to live in the delusion that they can turn back the clock here and they voted Republican and he wants their votes in the future, but I'm sure he knows it.
Coal jobs are never coming back. And if by any chance a couple do, I hope they are all performed by robots. Robots that run on solar.
Coal isn't coming back. It's something that sounded good to Trump's fans on the campaign trail, that's all. The coal industry employs fewer people than freaking Arby's. Fixing the coal industry would be like using a teaspoon to bail out a sinking Titanic. Middle America has far bigger problems that the dwindling coal industry.
Only reason why it's an issue at all is because it sounded good on the campaign trail for Trump's supporters. It's dog whistle politics, not an actual energy plan. To everyone else it sounds like Trump is saying "Coal is the future and will meet our energy needs cheaply and effectively!" Which it absolutely won't. But to his fans, it sounds like this: "Rust belt and former mining communities will get their jobs back and be prosperous again!" Sadly, it doesn't actually mean that either. Deregulate all you want, wind and solar are still going to be cheaper.
I feel bad for those folks in coal country counting on this guy to fix things for them. He isn't going to. He isn't able to. It'll be pretty bitter when they realize that.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
You're missing the point of a carbon tax. The tax is meant to speed the end of fossil fuel use. And really it's natural gas that killed coal, so you're going after the wrong target.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Great, then the market will kill off coal and we don't need propagandists or Government regulation forcing behavior. Obama and Hillary said flat out that they were putting Coal out of business by regulation and taxes, which we know as tyranny.
I have no problem with the best solution winning, but I certainly have a problem with Government agencies full of unaccountable appointees deciding who wins and loses.
Did anyone get a check back from Obama after the Solyndra bail-out fiasco? Nope. As with all of these interventionist policies, the only people who made money off the tax payer were cronies who voted for them. The Government sucks at picking winners and losers among themselves, let alone a business.
As to TFA's claim, if cheap energy is here why have my rates gone considerably higher, triple in December/Jan/Feb as most Californian's saw? Come tell me what will and won't work when you get back to planet Earth.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Your understanding of these things seems to be rooted in the 1970s. What you said used to be true, back then - but it's not today. The technology is improving rapidly, as is our ability to store and distribute that energy.
It's like the old notions about electric cars. All the prototype ones from 20 years ago were terrible on so many levels, in terms of power, range, recharge time, etc, not to mention cost. But as we're seeing now, that's changing radically. Go look at Tesla for instance. We may not yet be at the day where electric is 100% better in all areas, but it's now only a matter of when, not if.
The governor is a billionaire coal barron, and he's doing his best to revive coal as well. One major problem is that natural gas has taken over and the coal market just isn't there now. Aside from that, the cost to mine coal is way higher than it is for natural gas. To mine coal, you have to hire hundreds of miners, buy or lease really expensive equipment, dig a hole a couple of miles into the ground, then transport the product via truck or rail car to the buyer. To get natural gas, you drill a hole in the ground, insert a pipe, and connect it to other pipes.
Then, you have to factor in foreign competition. I used to work in IT for a coal company at the beginning of my career (mid '90s), and in spite of doing $160 million in business per year, we went bankrupt. It was cheaper then to mine coal in China and ship it to our local power plants than it was to mine it locally. I'm not sure that the coal market it to that point yet, but I expect to return to those days. Coal truck drivers here were making over $70k per year while their foreign counterparts were doing that for a fraction of the money.
Ironically, my office is in what used to be the headquarters for Columbia Gas Transmission in Charleston, WV, but that was bought out last year by TransCanada and several people were laid off. However, I don't work in the gas industry.
There is so much more coal, natural gas and oil for us to mine. Just because it's there doesn't mean we should mine it. Technology has made us too good at surveying and finding coal and oil fields. If we wait until we run out before we stop, we have perhaps hundreds of years to go. And there are going to be dire consequences, if we try to continue mining and burning coal and oil in large amounts for that long.
Now is the time to wrap up our use of some of these old energy sources and to invest in new energy sources. There are lots of proven options, and the technology around them keeps getting cheaper. It will be engineers and tech companies that are making the big bucks in the energy industry and not mine operators. (coal miners never made big bucks, I would say they got the shaft but that's an insensitive pun)
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Were you paid to write that? Because it's not true and any honest person would acknowledge that unsubsidised renewable energy source are being installed now, even in oil rich countries like Dubai.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Should 1.6% of the population of California have more say in the national government than 100% of the population of Wyoming? Should 2.4% of the population of Texas be able to negate the voice of 100% of Vermont?
"US" stands for "United States" Both the legislative branch of government and the national election system were created to provide a balance so that high population states could not impose their will on low population states via the U.S. government.
If you want California to be free of that annoying U.S. Constitution, SECEDE!
www.yescalifornia.org
The problem is Slashdot, Reddit, and the rest of the world are all full of assholes; and people like to claim reasoned, weighted analysis of facts are "opinions" rather than something like "conclusions". That lets people claim their so-called opinion is as valid as yours and, specifically, not capable of being wrong.
Take a minimum wage argument. Minimum wage has some complexities if you have a firm enough grasp of economics and money in economics.
Minimum wage increases because the amount of money increases faster than the amount of people, which requires more spending on the same products, which can only happen if prices increase. That means a fixed minimum wage starts to fall as a wage; with a given positive rate of inflation, that means these people's buying power and standard-of-living falls. To avoid minimum-wage workers becoming poorer and poorer, you have to raise the minimum wage along the way.
At the same time, wages are paid from revenue. That means spending. Spending comes out of income, which means it's a periodic cycle. Higher wages for everybody (proportionally) means inflation; higher wages for a subset means fewer things bought, which means fewer jobs. As minimum wage falls in purchasing power with inflation, additional jobs are created in this lowest-class; and when we true it up, those additional jobs are lost.
So a minimum wage increase 1) is necessary to meet the specific goals of minimum wage; and 2) has consequence of reducing the number of jobs, largely due to artificial increase in jobs available by lowering wages and thus allowing price lowering. Those are real, verifiable impacts largely agreed upon by economists across decades of publications, with a few dissenters who published papers with murky conclusions, weak assertions, and flawed methodology. That's a similar pattern to anti-vaxxer and climate-change debates, to which we tend to default toward consensus.
This draws all kinds of asinine responses everywhere. Most of it is people arguing economics from their own ideals instead of reasoned thought or a survey of consensus. To be fair, people argue a lot from often-repeated but factually-inaccurate ideals not supported by science, like that minimum wage increases are paid for almost 100% by the rich, or that a $1 increase in a minimum-wage income becomes $6 of spending and jogs the economy 6 times as hard. Most of the things we talk about are things we haven't personally been able to verify.
One of the enormous red flags, though, is the reasoning of "opinion". Someone, recognizing they've lost the reasoned argument because the facts stacked in front of them are too obviously-correct to attack, will claim that their "opinion" that raising minimum wage increases the number of jobs available (via minimum-wage spenders being able to spend more--never mind that they're only getting money that now isn't spent elsewhere, and will have to spend a larger chunk of that money on things produced by minimum-wage workers) is just as valid as your "opinion" that raising minimum wage decreases the number of jobs available.
You might notice these things can't be opinions. They're causal outcomes. Action X gives result Y.
Opinions are great. We can discuss opinions all day. Where will technology take us? Is Uber or Lyft better? Is Bullet for my Valentine as good as Iron Maiden? Is Final Fantasy 7 or Ocarina of Time more overhyped? Opinions are not facts, and conjectures occur in the absence of sufficient underlying reasoning and historical trends--and even conjectures have some factual basis, largely suggesting the form of what's missing. At a point, we're discussing what some of us understand better than others--and much of the world is filled with children who have less knowledge than the people who they're arguing with, and insist they must be right even though the other guy once thought the same thing, and was wrong then.
Welcome to a world full of assholes who care less about facts than about furthering their social position by either being right or being allied to a group of peers with the same imaginative fantasy about how the world works.
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To the extent that America is involved, it is mainly a device to reduce American exports of oil, by replacing American exports with cheaper Canadian exports.
Coal is only cheap when you ignore the environmental damage it does. Even disregarding the CO2 issue. Once you factor in all the measures you need to take to protect the environment from the radioactive waste, the sulphur and other nice byproducts of burning coal, well, it's not that cheap anymore.
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
The jobs aren't coming back. If coal production increases, the jobs that come back are going to Wyoming, not Kentucky, because the coal mining there uses fewer people and thus costs less.
"Uses fewer people and thus costs less" means "the jobs move there, but there aren't going to be very many of them."
Look at this one for data: Complex Market Forces Are Challenging Appalachian Coal Mining: https://www.americanprogress.o...
Good for all Americans? 1. Jobs for the people building and maintaining the pipeline.
Most of this will be temporary.
2. Tax revenues on their incomes and the incomes of the companies building the pipelines.
See #1
3. Moral for people who are ignored by coastal elites and are told that "they need to be re-educated." Not to mention the inflow of consumer dollars to hard hit communities.
Valid topic, keep reading.
4. Stop sending money to religious fanatics who then send money to radicalize mosques (you, as an educated person, should be quite aware of this).
This, while sounding true, is more blind than short-sighted. Think of the people that stopped investing in horses and shifted to automobiles.
5. Stop sending money (and jobs) to other the middle east and Russia.
Ok, you probably need more information to understand #4. Go read about how Germany made a law guaranteeing a good price for consumers that produced solar energy, back in the 90's. Out of nothing, it created an industry. Companies were born to build and install the panels. The country instantly became a global powerhouse for a growing industry (despite the same amount of sunlight as Seattle), and it led to a stock market boom. The real estate sector grew too - owners with roofs all of a sudden gained unexpected value in their investment. After so decades of profitability, the effects of a policy going too well are starting to set in and they do face issues, like China subsidies have been killing them, and they now have so much power they have to sell it to their neighbors. So they're tweaking a few things with the laws, maybe no more subsidies are needed anyway. But overall, it's been a huge success, and there's even been less power outages (granted, some work went into achieving that). So, moral of the story is that there are UUUGE profits in being the leader of a technology for the world, as long as you're willing to work.
6. Reduce the need to "protect" dangerous areas - hence less military presence, less potential for engagement.
The bad guys would rather blow up a huge oil refinery than a few houses with solar panels, or a couple wind turbines.
7. Money will flow to Canada and Canadian companies (as opposed to Saudi). This is a general plus dovetailed with points 4 and 5.
And at what cost?
Opportunity.
Not environmental.
Yes, environmental too.