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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."
Oh goody, More economic and environmental comments from slashdoter experts :-(
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.
Of the impacts on coal, regulations are at best 2-3 percent. No matter what some Red states may do, there are carbon taxes worldwide, and you either pay them at home (and invest in the local economy, like job retraining) or you pay them at the endpoint country (where they will just build more solar and wind and laugh at you).
Tough.
Adapt. Fossil fuels are over. They're too expensive.
Corporations know this. They're building more solar and wind for their new plants.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
less coal burning means less mercury in fish.
But Trump allowed coal miners to dump their crap into water, polluting it and of course, the fish down stream.
And while the rich coal mine owners line their pockets with more money, the communities that they destroyed have to buy bottled water.
Privatize the profits and socialize the costs - including the health costs to the people.
Yeah. Capitalism. Yeah. Trump. Making America Great again....more like throwing it back decades.
Coal is a shit fuel, it's outdated, old, inefficient and should just die. It's not cheap, either. It only SEEMS cheap because the costs are being subsidized by the rest of us.
Is there a solution for bulk storage of large amounts of energy? Most renewable sources aren't "uniform", e.g. you need wind to make wind energy, sun to make solar energy, etc. The advantage of fossil fuels and nuclear energy is they don't have that same limitation.
Do you have any actual evidence that wind farms have this effect? This strikes me as arguing that NASA shouldn't use gravity assist because it robs a planet of some of its momentum.
In other words, while you're technically correct, the effect is so small as to be irrelevant. But tell you what, if you have evidence that wind farms actually have this large an effect, then provide citations. And no, some blog is not a citation. I mean peer reviewed or primary literature.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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
There's specific things they did poorly, like Solyndra, but overall the Recovery Act investments in solar etc. played a notable part in making solar competitive by creating solar demand and funding R&D.
Table-ized A.I.
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.
With climate change, there's more energy in the atmosphere than before, so pulling a tiny amount out with wind turbines will help, not hurt. That said, the sort of wind power being installed now can't be taking more than a fraction of a rounding error of energy out of the atmosphere so it's only theoretical.
Gasoline is one of the most compact and highly useful energy sources available. Coal is also compact and highly useful.
Sun and wind are not. They are a pain to store, huge losses during transport, not evenly distributive. Forever the pipe dream of the ideological.
For electric to really take off, you either need coal (or other dinofuel) or nuclear. Personally, i'd like more pebble bed reactors.
the problem is the regulations holding back leeching, we need CanDo in Chief that will cut those regulations...
1/we're not even close to replacing even 1% of the wind drag of all those forest we cut down.
2/ignoring that, if there was no drag of anything on the face of the planet, the wind would blow thousands of miles an hour, due to the continuous supply of energy from the sun.
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
you mean a level playing field? I am all for.
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
1) It produces more radioactivity than all other energy sources, including Nuclear power. (A small percentage of coal is thorium, which settles around wherever you burn the coal.)
2) It takes more work to mine it than all other sources (including uranium - though it does require less processing).
3) It takes more work to ship it from it's source to the plant than all other energy types.
4) It produces more carbon pollution than all other sources. Coal is basically pure carbon plus some nasty impurities. Oil and gas are Carbon + Hydrogen + some other stuff. Carbon burns to Carbon Dioxide (or worse, monoxide). Hydrogen burns nice and clean, turning into water.
5) Coal contains trace amounts of mercury, which when burned makes it's way into the atmosphere, then rains down into the oceans. Nasty stuff. No other energy source has this problem.
6) Coal mining has some nasty problems, including black lung disease and sometimes starts underground fires we literally can NOT put out.
No sane person mines coal for energy if they have any other energy source. All others are safer and better. Burning oil, gas, or wood are all better. Nuclear is better. Tidal, wind, solar, hydro, are all better.
Coal mining should only be used after you have burned all your forests up, mined all your uraninum, pumped all your natural gas and oil, and the sun has gone out.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
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.
of course, this would mean MASSIVE scaling back of subsidies for coal. AND the coal industry needing to clean up the garbage they put into the air.
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
With the cheap methane from fracking we can turn coal into clean burning gasoline...
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10...
love is just extroverted narcissism
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.
You are implying here, without actually saying it, that coal is over regulated but where is your evidence for that? The article has laid out a ton of reasons why coal is in decline that have nothing to do with regulation what so ever. Plus, it clearly indicates that automation has gutted the number of coal jobs that are created so adding more coal capacity (or using what we have) will not employ more people than increasing capacity of renewables so if its not really cheaper and its not creating more jobs, why should we be so worried about how level its playing field is (which, again, you have shown no evidence for).
By removing what regulation there is we might temporarily increase the amount of energy produced by coal in this country but that money wont go to poor, out of work miners or plant workers thanks to automation that money will go to line the pockets of the people who own the power plants and mines, all it does is let them squeeze the last few dollars out of their investment at the cost of our environment. Thats not good economic policy, its a hand out to rich people.
Removing what regulation we have on coal doesn't put coal on a level playing field, it gives it an unfair advantage, letting the owners of these plants and mines make more money while pushing the cost of pollution onto the rest of us. We end up paying for the environmental impact that will need to be cleaned up envetually, the health care costs due to pollution, and even impact on other industries like fishing where many people might loose their jobs if areas are no longer fishable).
Its a loosing bet and your supposedly free market is going to produce better outcomes than letting this industry die a natural death. Right now its hard to see why we shouldn't accelerate the death of coal, encourage private investment in other energy sources so that we are ahead of the game and have a well secured energy plan for the next 50 or so years rather than propping up old tech at the expense of building new industry which could provide us with a big boon in the future when we are creating the turbines and solar panels that the rest of the world also uses.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
So called experts have been predicting the depletion of coal and oil reserves for about 40 years or so (google it). They have been wildly wrong. Just saying.
If you disagree, please post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like
As a strong supporter of renewable, as the economics of renewable continue to shift to make carbon unaffordable, then hell yes we should eventually tax renewables. Once renewables are at full scale and entrenched they should indeed pay their full cost to society just like an auto plant, internet company or a barber shop should. We are not quite there yet and each renewable technology is at different levels of economic and technological maturity so phasing in taxes and removing supports should be done in an thoughtful way.
Young disrupting technologies will often find ways around the existing tax structures. That is well and good in the short term, but long term they need to payback for their disruption and yes, that very much includes helping paying for the transition of coal workers to new opportunities. The renewable entrepreneurs who have benefited by this disruption also have a moral responsibility to help provide their resources and abilities to help these disrupted communities and displaced workers build a better future.
The commenters here aren't to be blamed.
Blame msmash and the other Slashdot editors for putting these shitty submissions on the front page multiple times every day.
It's the submissions they choose that control what we're allowed to talk about here. After all, if we try to discuss something other than the submission topic, we get attacked with "Offtopic" downmods.
So when a quarter of each day's front page submissions are about "climate change" in some way, then of course climate change is what we'll be stuck discussing.
When the next quarter of each day's front page submissions are all about attacking President Trump in some way, then of course politics is what we'll be stuck discussing.
When the third quarter of each day's front page submissions are all about Uber, then of course ride sharing is what we'll be stuck discussing.
When the final quarter of each day's front page submissions are all about Netflix, then of course streaming media is what we'll be stuck discussing.
Sure, we'd rather be discussing stuff like programming, programming languages, databases, operating systems, and DIY tech projects. But submissions about those things very rarely end up on the front page, so we aren't allowed to discuss them.
Again, if you have a problem with the current sorry state of affairs, don't blame the community. It's not our fault that the editors here choose the worst submissions possible.
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 current market forces point to a direction of renewables, natural gas, and whatever nuclear remains operational (with no new nuclear plants). That's not a bad plan for the US for right now. However, natural gas in the US is currently 1/3 to 1/4 the cost of any other natural gas in the world. It is exceptionally, and historically cheap. Various people estimate that this low-pricing situation will last between 15 and 100 years. My personal opinion is that it is difficult to make estimates on that kind of timeframe.
Regardless, if natural gas in the US ever approaches the cost of natural gas elsewhere in the world, US consumers would be in for a very rude awakening on their utility bills. My personal opinion is that we should not eliminate these plants entirely. It isn't wrong to let market forces dictate our choices, but we should hedge against unfavorable market changes in the future.
Disclaimer- I'm "in the industry", my customers are roughly 60% gas and 40% coal.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Coal is dead. ... trying to resurrect something ... dying [from] market forces ... is [perjorative].
This isn't about trying to resuscitate the coal industry (though if it lets it run a little longer and die more smoothly - rather than being suddenly assassinated in a fit of political vitrual-signaling - it will let the miners and their offspring migrate to other jobs, rather than to government assistance.)
It's about killing off the massive, expensive, and intrusive regulatory infrastructure that no longer serves any purpose.
If Big Coal IS being killed by market forces, the government needn't bother killing it off.
It also gives Trump the opportunity to keep a promise to some of his voting base, make political appearances claiming credit for it, and engage in some virtual-signaling of his own (conservative style).
Remember: He didn't promise to bring their jobs back (though if some of the jobs do come back, or existing ones not be ended as soon, it is a bonus). He promised to dismantle the regulations that had already killed jobs - and give a dose of job-killing medicine to the regulators.
I suspect schadenfreud will please his coal-state voters, and the prospect of voter revolts and sweeping reforms may make at least a few future regulators think twice before stomping jackbooted on the faces of those they regulate.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
From the DoE:
Major energy sources and percent shares of U.S. electricity generation at utility-scale facilities in 2016:
Natural gas = 33.8%
Coal = 30.4%
Nuclear = 19.7%
Renewables (total) = 14.9%
Hydropower = 6.5%
Wind = 5.6%
Biomass = 1.5%
Solar = 0.9%
Geothermal = 0.4%
Petroleum = 0.6%
Other gases = 0.3%
Other nonrenewable sources = 0.3%
Pumped storage hydroelectricity = -0.2%
So, wind + solar = 6.5%
Coal + natural gas + nuclear = 83.9%
Winner = not renewables
If coal's been on the decline it's only because the Obama administration demonized it and because we had a happy accident of finding an abundance of natural gas. Wind and solar would be nowhere without massive government subsidies.
Meanwhile, I'm still waiting on those fusion reactors.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
You correctly arrived at one response, that nothing you do now will change the inevitable failure of coal.
My crystal ball does not work well enough to say that coal will die. Propagandists make the claim, I wait for what really happens. That is called reality.
You incorrectly think that market failures for growing new energy are unusual. The major thing that kept renewables down for so long was access to capital. When most nations and corporations started investing capital in renewables, costs dropped. It's how capitalism works.
I made no such claim, but your claim is a flat out lie. Subsidies have been poured into alternative energy, and this is still happening at massive scale. Take away the tax credits, incentives and subsidies and alternatives would not be able to compete with the exception of nuclear power. Wind requires massive amounts of land, and solar is still not cost effective for about a decade and panels don't last that long. We have certainly seen improvements, but the push to _use_ is not coming from the market but Government regulations and policies. Not Capitalism, but Tyranny (text book definition).
As to your own rates, that's probably because you haven't taken control of your own energy production, and built your own renewables, like a true capitalist would. You probably depend on Big Government for your energy supply for the most part.
Energy production in the US is run and regulated by Federal and State authorities. Capitalism is not at play here, though in certain areas you may be permitted to install Solar panels. This reduces some costs, but lacks storage which you would not be allowed to build due to regulation. As with above, this is not Capitalism but Tyranny.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Coal Industries should invest more in cutting-edge technologies that reduce it's environmental impact, for example: http://www.sciencedirect.com/s... and they must start using small and cheap remote controlled devices for mining...
GP is about as accurate as that politician who claimed wind farms would cause global warming, by reducing the wind.
Climate is dominated by wind in the upper atmosphere, completely unaffected by the tiny amount of energy that might be pulled out by wind farms.
What about tidal power, though? Won't that affect the Moon's orbit over time? Apparently, I'm not the only person to worry about this. Looks like it could be a real problem in a few billion years!
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Coal is no longer economically advantageous and the market is switching to sources that are. The cost per kWh for wind and solar have plummeted so much in the last couple of years they are now cheaper than nuclear which had for decades been the cheapest "clean" energy source. Many nuclear facilities are now being aged out and plans to build new facilities have dropped. Add to that energy storage technology has also come down in cost per kWh so those solar arrays can be used to generate power for overnight and coal becomes downright expensive. Sometimes capitalism can cause the right thing to happen in spite of itself.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
This article is fake news, Solar and wind are not cheap nor can they replace coal. They do not provide a base load. COal is cheap compared to solar and wind, is more abundant, does provide base load and can provide far more energy than solar or wind. Solar and wind cannot provide more than small fraction of coal. Scarcity produces higher prices, ergo, it is not cheap. It has low energy density as well, hence you can generate the same amount of energy with far smaller coal power plants, the equivalent solar and wind would involve massive infrastructure.
The only reason coal has declines is because of suppressive regulations. If the regulations are removed, then coal will become much more affordable and win in the market. Solar and wind cannot win in the market, because they are expensive.
that solar is environmentally friendly is also a myth. The massive amount of used solar panels is a huge environmental disaster in the making and the materials that they are made from are very rare, making photovoltaic nonsustainable. Due to low energy density of wind, there also exists massive material usage due to the large number of wind generators.
Solar city proposed three different systems for my house. None made financial sense.
The payback was always somewhere in the ballpark of 20 years! That's if the system was paid for up-front. And I didn't even consider the opportunity cost of the $30,000 system cost.
Financing the system only made the numbers worse.
Renewables still have some mathematically inescapable problems. These systems are to costly for the amount of electricity they generate and their square footage requirements are far too high.
Power companies are really good at making lots of electricity fairly cheaply. Coal and Nuclear - despite their obvious problems are still cheap ways to generate power.
And yet even with all those people employed, its cheaper to deploy new solar capacity than coal. Sounds like a good deal to me.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
The only cheap and carbon footprint free energy will be Fusion. Everything else is caca
Coal is needed to make steel for one and many other things too, so it is anything but dead..
You mean to say that you can't make steel with the power from a bunch of solar cells or a windmill? Who knew.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
When will Trump bring back leeching?
They're already back. They're used in limb reattachment surgery post-operative treatment.
When limbs are reattached the arteries work well right away but the veins not so much. So they have poor circulation and inadequate oxygenation, especially at the finger and toe tips. This can lead to further cell death, infection, and transplant failure.
Leeches applied to the extremities of the limbs can pull out enough blood and bring in fresh to keep more cells alive and bring more infection-fighting white cells to the area. And leeches do little damage other than draining blood, and provide their own surgical tools and anaesthetic. (It's in their evolutionary interest to not bother the victim into pulling them off while they're feeding, and not leaving wounds that would make him tend to avoid the location later.) So raised-sterile leeches are used, with substantial improvement in reattachment success rates.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Maybe we need a new handle - "Anonymous Cretin"?
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
They don't release equivalent levels of carbon, though. Natural gas releases quite a bit less carbon for equivalent units of energy produced.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
About 14% of global coal production (and 6% of CO2 emissions) is used in smelting iron and in steel production.
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
This flawed argument ignores the incontrovertible fact that allowing coal to continue to provide energy on equal terms with other energy supplies rather than pressuring the market to switch to less environmentally damaging sources of energy would do real and substantial harm to us all. The bottom line is: the less energy produced from burning coal and supplied instead from less polluting resources, the better off the world is.
So in fact, there is a need for it to have the crap regulated out of it in a context where it can be replaced with (considerably) less polluting energy sources, which is exactly where we are today.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I thought the point of renewables is that they have very little cost to society. There is no CO2, NOx, heavy metal pollution, mine tailings, etc. There is a small amount of pollution related to the manufacture of solar panels, windmills, etc. but beyond that, there is no ongoing pollution as there is with fossil fuels.
You seem to think that they should pay a tax for retraining workers... perhaps, but that is also a very small amount compared to the amount of energy generated and is covered by existing government programs.
So, what is the rationale for taxing renewables?
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
It has nothing to do with power. Electric arc furnaces work fine, but unless steel is recycled it has to be made anew from iron ore, and that requires carbon, either by the way of a blast furnace and coke (which is made from coal) or direct reduction, which requires either coal syngas or natural gas.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
While reading your post one thought came to mind. Since coal regulation has been around so long, how come no regulatory capture? I read about this all the time on /., and often see the results of it in various industries. How is it that the coal industry was never able to do that? The answer might be useful for areas where we do not want regulatory capture.
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
If cheap energy is here and coal is never coming back, why worry ?
If coal competes with "cheap energy" then it probably wasn't that cheap after all.
If someone who is pro "cheap energy" is blowing a gasket over coal being deregulated perhaps they have a hidden agenda they aren't sharing ?
Coal is needed to make steel for one and many other things too, so it is anything but dead..
You mean to say that you can't make steel with the power from a bunch of solar cells or a windmill? Who knew.
That remains to be seen. But, back to the OP's point...coal is an essential physical component of making steel.
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
In the interest of presenting a more thorough picture, let me point out that modern coal plants are equipped with scrubbers that can remove SO2, mercury, thorium, etc from the smoke. Still, a lot (half?) of our coal power plants are not equipped with scrubbers. Not a coal shill, I just think that you've omitted a rather important factoid from your list.
You don't need coal to make steel. Coke (which is made from coal) is the traditional fuel, but you can also use natural gas... and there's no reason natural gas needs to come from a non-renewable source.
In fact all you really need is a high purity source of carbon.
=Smidge=
Sarcasm aside, that is exactly why coal jobs are not coming back. Coal production is in fact very close to an all-time high in the United States-- we're mining about 900 million tons a year, more coal now than we did in 1990 (or any year before then).
But we're doing it with machinery now, not with coal miners. Even if coal production increases, the jobs ain't coming back.
Graph: http://www.insidenergy.com/wp-...
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.
I mod you +1 Cromulent.
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
Try Cambridge or something reputable instead of what ever you used to find the list of synonyms and rubbish.
tyranny /trni/
noun
[ C/U ] us
social studies - Unlimited authority or use of power, or a government which exercises such power without any control or limits
When a Government is described as a tyranny, the definitions for tyrant (singular) do not apply. Giving you the benefit of the doubt that English is not your first language.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
If cutting regulations on coal doesn't make it come back, then obviously it doesn't matter, either for the climate or the economy.
If cutting regulations on coal leads to a comeback of coal and a delay of the adoption of "wind and solar", then that shows you conclusively that it was regulations that were pricing coal out of the market, not the competitiveness of wind and solar.
In fact, however, the whole article is a false dichotomy. Wind and solar are still fairly expensive. They may be competitive for electricity generation in about a decade, but you still need other generation technologies to smooth out supply. And the fossil fuel technology we'll be using in the meantime is probably mostly natural gas.
What should anyone care? Coal is done. Wind and solar are unstoppable. So Trump's deregulation will not impact anything at all, right? Maybe at worst a little bit more coal-related pollution until coal runs out and solar and wind in their inevitable supremacy wipe the need for coal, gas, oil, and nuclear right off the deck.
The commenters here aren't to be blamed. Blame msmash and the other Slashdot editors for putting these shitty submissions on the front page multiple times every day.... So when a quarter of each day's front page submissions are about "climate change" in some way, then of course climate change is what we'll be stuck discussing.
I counted the headlines before this one, and out of the 50 posts in the last two days, exactly one ("China To Boost Non-Fossil Fuel Use To 20 Percent By 2030 (reuters.com)") was related to climate. Another one, ("The EPA Won't Be Shutting Down Its Open Data Website After All (mashable.com)") could be considered slightly somewhat peripherally related.
So, that's--at most--two out of fifty: four percent. Your claim "a quarter of each day's front page submissions are about "climate change"" is bullshit.
Nobody migrates from job X to job Y, in a positional sense. Those jobs will continue to exist as long as required. Causing 10,000,000 people to go unemployed over 5 years instead of 5 weeks prevents an economic recession by unemployment spike, but those people--whoever is sitting in that seat when it comes time to downsize--will be lain off.
They'll then go into the churn with people who already don't have jobs, and compete. Either they get the next job, or some other guy gets the next job; somebody in this pool stays unemployed.
There are no people. The romantic ideal of migrating a worker from an excessed job to another one by some economic oversight is complete and utter bullshit, and outright evil. It means taking people who are already transitional--in and out of jobs, currently out of a job--and condemning them to forever-unemployment.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Market forces are not killing coal, it costs less then 3.5 cents to produce per kwh, it is cheaper then every other form of electricity production. The lifetime costs per kwh for coal are 3 cents cheaper then the lifetime kwh costs for solar. Solar needs to double output and half cost so that battery storage becomes cost effective. Lots of improvement need to happen before the market will start rejecting coal.
Knowledge = Power
P= W/t
t=Money
Money = Work/Knowledge so the less you know the more you make
Maybe they want their old jobs back? That's something nobody's really considered (except maybe Trump's team).
That's real conservatism. Resisting change. I can't necessarily blame them. You spend your life learning to mine coal learning something new is hard.
It doesn't help that nobody said anything about supporting them while they're in school for their new job. So we'd be asking them to work full time at whatever crap job they found while going to school full time (often in their 40s & 50s). It also doesn't help that most of the help on offer is just more high interest loans for schools either. But hey, is anyone here willing to let somebody in their 40s take a 4 year vacation to go back to school just because they picked the wrong career? I am, but then I'm a dirty commie pinko (or so I'm told).
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Ok, thanks for the clarification.
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
Thorium 'clean nuclear'?
Ever thought about what will happen if a bit of oxygen enters the vessel? Or if the cooling system fails?
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
The 'denser' the energy generation is, the more it is open to centralized abuse.
J.P. Morgan killed Tesla's project of wireless energy distribution the moment he realized it couldn't be metered.
That's the same reason why solar got so little support for such a long time.
Let the people buy their solar roof, although I predict that taxation will replace the centralized billing.
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
Not really, HVDC is able to move huge amounts of energy at a high efficiency. Interrupting the current in the case of faults however was a limiting factor.
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
So you're saying that bluefoxlucid is full of shit and all his fancy math was for nothing as he built his foundation on the wrong plot of land? Lets see if he can extricate himself from the logical trap he so deftly laid for himself.
Only I can judge you.
Indeed, renewables are drastically lighter on the planet than fossil fuels. I am a staunch environmentalist and I believe that renewable are such a wonderful and productive thing that they can provide more than just clean energy. Their economic power can help build our economy AND pay for many needs in our society. All human activity is going to have indirect (externalized) costs. National security, police roads, small pollination impacts, education for the workers who design and run the facility and many other costs of keeping a society need to have their fair share borne by all manufacturers who see the benefits of a civil society. . Yes, this is much much smaller for renewables than fossil fuels, but once an industry has been give a little incubation room and is flourishing it is time for it to pay its own way. That will be in the next decade or so for solar and wind. Regrettably, this tax normalization was NOT done on oil. Oil still receives massive tax subsidies. It is safe to say that somewhere in the last 157 years since oil was first discovered in Pennsylvania oil has somehow learned to stand on their own two feet and no longer needs to feed at the public trough. So oil really needs a big tax to make-up all the hand-outs they have received in the last century and a half.
It's about killing off the massive, expensive, and intrusive regulatory infrastructure that protects the environment and forces the energy industry to account for and avoid externalities.
Trump signs bill quashing the Office of Surface Mining's Obama-era Stream Protection Rule, a regulation to protect waterways from coal mining waste
I'm also curious to see MountainLogic's response. I'm sure it will be a deucey.
Only I can judge you.
I don't think they were talking about coal as a power/energy source but rather as a source of carbon (could be wrong though) the thing is that all steel needs is carbon. It doesn't necessarily have to come from coal (renewable sources of carbon would do).
What if was made by the way of a blast furnace and pepsi instead?
#DeleteFacebook
Who is worth more? A few hundred thousand jobs directly in coal and the places coal employees spend money and their towns and so forth, OR the few billion other lives that will be affected by climate change?
Ah well you see, those few billion people are mostly brown, mostly don't vote in the US, and don't live in coal towns. So proceed with the coal!
I've spent a lot of time in coal country West Virginia, and it is absolutely true, these people don't have many options. There are usually two industries: coal and farming,and farming is not exactly hiring a lot of people. As a result, the people in the towns I visited were thrilled to have jobs working at McDonalds or Subway or Family Dollar, because there was nothing else. The next nearest towns were often an hour away by car, so fuel cost for driving is very high, on some of the most dangerous roads in the US. Anyone who could get A local job was immediately better off.
And a lot of the remaining people lived as best they could, farming for food and so forth. The situation is bleak and a lot of people do turn to meth because there is both an incentive to sell it and make money, and a lot of reason to want to be drugged out of your mind and forget how bad life is.
The problem with supporting coal now is that there is no future in it. Either we let the industry die now. Or we prop it up now and it has to die later. But it is going to die. Supporting it now and allowing more people to begin careers in it is criminal since we KNOW we can't sustain this and these people will be the next ones with no options in 10 or 20 years, or less depending on how the electoral winds blow.
Sig for hire.
I'm no expert, but wouldn't it be cheaper to pipe the oil to vancouver or somewhere and ship it from there? Keystone gets it to the wrong ocean for China, plus it is about 4x longer than going to the west coast.
Man, you really need that seminar!
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...
I'm no expert, but wouldn't it be cheaper to pipe the oil to vancouver or somewhere and ship it from there?
Ever hear of those things called the Rocky Mountains?
Roughly, you'd rather pipe oil downhill than uphill. So, whichever direction the watershed flows, that's the direction you want to send your oil.
If it were easier to flow to Vancouver than to the gulf, the Mississippi river would flow west.
Wind accounted for 5.6% of power generation in 2016.
Solar accounted for 0.9%.
https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs...
I'm sure, on a more local level (like Texas), Wind accounts for a more significant portion per-capita. As does solar in areas with lots of sunshine (like Nevada and Hawaii).
But considering that Nuclear, which is essentially stagnant or post-peak due to the way the market's been poisoned against it, is producing over three times the power that Wind and Solar do on an AGGREGATE basis.
And that Coal and Hydro (which is post-peak) EACH produce about five times what Wind and Solar (again aggregate) do.
I'd say calling Wind and Solar "unstoppable" at this point is putting the cart WELL before the horse...as in "What's that out there on the horizon?"
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
If coal's been on the decline it's only because the Obama administration demonized it ...
I don't know where you got that from but it's Completely wrong. Natural Gas is cheaper than coal and power plants have been switching whenever they can. FRACKING is doing more to kill coal.
Whatever Obama or any other President says have very little influence - if any - on a business' decisions.
And we are going to see further decline in coal because of cheaper alternative fuels - like natural gas.
All that shit about Obama and War on Coal was Mitch McConnell's lies to get votes and lobby for his masters ($$$$) in the Coal industry.
If coal is so irrelevant, how come China is increasing purchases of U.S. coal??
Coal use is slowly declining but that does NOT mean you cannot improve the U.S. coal industry and bring back jobs. Trump understands this, coal miners understand this, why can't you?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Ever hear of those things called the Rocky Mountains?
I appreciate your condescending, smug response. I liked it so much I poked around and found that Kinder Morgan built a pipeline across the Canadian rockies in the 50s and expanded it in 2004. It can transport 300k barrels a day and there are proposals to triple it. For comparison, Keystone is ~500k barrels/day.
So you're completely totally wrong. Put that in your pipe and send it over the rockies!
Man, you really need that seminar!
No special taxes. No subsidies. No kick-backs.
The market will sort it out unless somebody artificially messes up the marketplace.
Ferret
Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc
Well, it has the added benefit of influencing voters.
That's true of pretty much anything. Typically we want multiple projects going on at the same time.
Table-ized A.I.
"Disclaimer- I'm "in the industry", my customers are roughly 60% gas and 40% coal"
Why is natgas priced locally but oil is priced on the world market?
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
"Young disrupting technologies will often find ways around the existing tax structures. That is well and good in the short term, but long term they need to payback for their disruption and yes, that very much includes helping paying for the transition of coal workers to new opportunities." - surely that will be covered by a sales tax like the one applied at the pump otherwise the government is going to lose a lot of tax revenue when EVs become the mainstream.
"The renewable entrepreneurs who have benefited by this disruption also have a moral responsibility to help provide their resources and abilities to help these disrupted communities and displaced workers build a better future" - i don't see why the wealthy mine owners and fossil fuel power generators shouldn't pay for the retraining as they didn't learn from history, stuck their heads in the sand and did not modernise. The renewable entrepreneurs will automatically retrain the ex-miners if they apply and get a job with them.
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
I would recommend you to actually read the article. I know this breaks ancient Slashdot traditions, but the article is actually really good. It doesn't get bogged down with the Trump is stupid, Hillary is evil garbage that we usually hear. (Why still discuss Hillary's relative merits at all, that ship has sailed?). The trends are very clear: Coal doesn't make sense financially and even if it did, it wouldn't generate significant jobs. That means that the powers that be don't have to be convinced about the massive environmental damage from mining and burning coal, including droughts, famine, rising sea levels, extreme weather and the social unrest that will follow. Counting dollars will do the trick. Unfortunately the same isn't true about tar sand based oil production which is a total mess of its own. From a European perspective, the conversion to electric cars will be extremely quick. Most people would rather drive electric if it was cost neutral and the range was adequate. With a gas price of 6$ per gallon and rising (from taxes mostly), new cheaper/better electric cars coming out 2018/19 and a rapidly growing fast charge network I know my next car will be electric. Again, RTFA.
Electric arc furnaces work fine, but unless steel is recycled it has to be made anew from iron ore, and that requires carbon,
Not to mention that when you recycle steel, you either have to mix it with virgin metal to get something that behaves like new steel, or you wind up with something harder that isn't good for the same things. Aluminum doesn't have this problem.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Should 1.6% of the population of California have more say in the national government than 100% of the population of Wyoming?
In short, yes. Fuck Wyoming if it's so shit that everyone wants to move away.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
If the contention is that renewable energy sources, like solar, are now truly cheaper than coal, then it doesn't really matter what Trump decides to do with coal regulations; market demand will move past coal regardless of political motivations to keep it. So why complain about deregulation of something that's going away anyway... unless pricing and fungibility of those renewable sources isn't quite as compelling as you're trying to claim?
"Is not a sentence" is not a sentence. Well damn.
It is easier to transport oil than natural gas.
Sounds like American companies get a piece of oil that would route around them, then. We get revenue from this shit?
What about the environmental impact of current routing of oil through leaky pipelines run way outside their design pressure? Taxpayer superfunds still pay for that.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
We're already pipelining oil from Canadian tar sands through existing US pipelines, at high pressure, causing enormous oil spills. Taxpayer money cleans those up. Even if we're just letting Canadian companies sell it to China, they now have to pay American companies (which American governments can tax), and a properly-designed pipeline will spill less oil that we then need to clean up, as I said above.
Besides, if Canadian oil is cheaper than American, then we'll buy it here in America. If American is cheaper, we'll sell ours to China.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Thank you for your cogent and rational contribution to the conversation.
If you can't attack the facts, attack the messenger, amirite?
-Styopa
With regards to Solar City's proposals, I was buying electricity from the power company in every configuration except the largest config.
In that instance, I would generate all the power I would need and even sell some back to the power company. The problem is that I am, essentially, buying 20 years worth of power up-front instead of paying the power company over time for the same electricity.
Who knows if I will still live in this house in 20 years? The last thing I want to do is buy someone else solar panels.
Is it possible that someone would pay me more for my house since it has solar panels? Possibly, but I'm not willing to make that bet.
Ever hear of those things called the Rocky Mountains?
I appreciate your condescending, smug response.
This is slashdot. If it were reddit, the response would be condescending and smug, but also profane and insulting.
I liked it so much I poked around and found that Kinder Morgan built a pipeline across the Canadian rockies in the 50s and expanded it in 2004. It can transport 300k barrels a day and there are proposals to triple it. For comparison, Keystone is ~500k barrels/day.
Just because somebody can do something doesn't mean that if there is a more efficient way to do it, you wouldn't prefer to do it that way. If a shorter route crossing the Rockies had actually been a more efficient way to transport oil than a longer pipeline not crossing the mountains, you would expect that other companies would have emulated this pipeline. But they didn't.
So you're completely totally wrong. Put that in your pipe and send it over the rockies!
+1 funny from me for the double-entendre metaphor.
You had built up this elaborate argument, it was based on an incorrect concept, so you do a quick repaint and it's ready to go? I don't think so.
Only I can judge you.
http://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-coal-hobet/
Current electricity prices: Well, it's expensive to generate electricity! we need to raise your rates.
Electricity prices with cheap abundant power: Well, nobody's buying our power anymore, and we need to maintain infrastructure, so we're raising our rates!
While environmental activists would gladly make you think otherwise, coal is alive and well.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Tough talk, AC.
CO2 emissions have fuck-all to do with what's being discussed. Should I discuss breakfast cereals? It's just as relevant.
Again, you say "that site sucks": either show where their FACTS are wrong, or stfu.
-Styopa
We're already pipelining oil from Canadian tar sands through existing US pipelines, at high pressure, causing enormous oil spills. Taxpayer money cleans those up.
Exactly correct. However, perhaps that is a pretty good reason to not fscking do that?
Even now, the terribly poor crude has to be mixed with other stuff and heated, just to get it through the pipelines at high pressure.
Hey - here's a thought. Hw about Canada, refining the crude themselves?
Regardless, the Canadian Tar Sands oil is the proof that we are hitting the proverbial bottom of the barrel. It's the oil equivalent of reprocessing our shit and eating it.
Because unless you are a fan of the abiotic oil concept - essentially saying Gawd made it, do you deny that oil is going to to become so scarce that it isn't profitible to pump it any more? Do you know the conditions that produce oil are almost certainly never going to exist again, just like coal production? Or more likely, you don't care.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
You had built up this elaborate argument, it was based on an incorrect concept, so you do a quick repaint and it's ready to go? I don't think so.
Yeah, but he gets points for going after liberals. When in doubt, dig up some alternative facts.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
I appreciate your condescending, smug response. I liked it so much I poked around and found that Kinder Morgan built a pipeline across the Canadian rockies in the 50s and expanded it in 2004. It can transport 300k barrels a day and there are proposals to triple it. For comparison, Keystone is ~500k barrels/day.
I suspect that Canada is wishing to send their bottom of the barrel quality oil though the new majick pipeline shortcut so we can deal with the damage. The tar sands have to be heated then mixed with some actual high quality crude, and pumped at high pressure just to get it through the pipelines. That's an interesting recipe.
Regardless, there is a lot of opposition to them building a new pipeline in their own country. I'm pretty certain they can't use the old ones because they would blow out.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Sounds like American companies get a piece of oil that would route around them, then. We get revenue from this shit?
We probably get a refining fee, and use unused refinery capacity.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Vancouver is not a year round port. The Keystone XL pipline will tie in pipelines comeing down into Illinois with pipelines coming up into Oklahoma. Canadian companies want to foot the majority of the cost as it will give a year round market for their shale oil. It gives the U.S. oil companies access to more feedstock for the refineries.
Yeah, Canadian companies what to sell their product all year long rather than having to stockpile in the winter months.
NRRPT/RCT
Are you sure? I've been to Vancouver in January and it never got below freezing and I saw plenty of cargo ships.
Man, you really need that seminar!
I assume that the AC intended their "fix" as a snarhttps://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=10538625&cid=54306425#ky troll. While their changes do change some of the meaning I do indeed agree with the changes. So, thanks.