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Chinese Company Offers Free Training For US Coal Miners To Become Wind Farmers (qz.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Quartz: If you want to truly understand what's happening in the energy industry, the best thing to do is to travel deep into the heart of American coal country, to Carbon County, Wyoming (yes, that's a real place). The state produces most coal in the US, and Carbon County has long been known (and was named) for its extensive coal deposits. But the state's mines have been shuttering over the past few years, causing hundreds of people to lose their jobs in 2016 alone. Now, these coal miners are finding hope, offered from an unlikely place: a Chinese wind-turbine maker wants to retrain these American workers to become wind-farm technicians. It's the perfect metaphor for the massive shift happening in the global energy markets. The news comes from an energy conference in Wyoming, where the American arm of Goldwind, a Chinese wind-turbine manufacturer, announced the free training program. More than a century ago, Carbon County was home to the first coal mine in Wyoming. Soon, it will be the site of a new wind farm with hundreds of Goldwind-supplied turbines.
I'm not sure what the job world is like, but in engineering college, the foreign kids were sitting in the library on Friday night of a holiday weekend while most of the natives were out partying.
The American ones were hounded out of existence because wind power was seen to be on the wrong side of politics.
Wow, they'll even pretend they care about the environment if that's what it takes to make the opposing party look bad.
Political tragics are so fucking ridiculous especially hard rightwingers. To them values and morality are nothing but talking points to be discarded when inconvenient.
Can we get onto something technical about the topic instead of stupid political games with astroturfing fake eagle lovers?
There's enough coal in the USA to power the country for a century.
And there's enough wind in the USA to power the country forever.
Let me see if I got this straight...
A corporation is offering free training to people without requiring any work in return. The same Yanks who always whine about how corporations should be allowed to do as they please without fear of consequences think this is bad. Does this mean what you really hate is anything that's good for plebs, or did I miss something?
Who would have thought that Edumacation can help to generate overall revenue in a "win-win" scenario? Wow.
Perhaps we should all somehow centrally contribute to this concept, and provide a free education to all of those who are displaced by technology and innovation profoundly changing the way we do things?
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
Did you collect your check from the Koch Brothers for posting that falsehood?
The worst part is that a lot of these people work for free.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Plants, like everything else, evolve for the environment they exist in. Increased CO2 only increases plant yields within a fairly narrow band - the same band that's existed for the past twenty million years or so. Outside that band it harms plants, too little harms them obviously but so does too much - just as living in an excessively high oxygen environment is harmful to animals.
Of course, if the oxygen level changes significantly - animals do evolve to live in the new ranges, but that takes millions of years, pretty much everything that lived beforehand dies off - and new species replace them. The last time there was a huge change was in the carboniferous era - the evolution of wooded plants produced plant matter that nothing at the time could digest, so when those trees died, they didn't rot and return their carbon as carbon-dioxide and take the oxygen they had produced back out of the atmosphere - they just lay there until they got buried by geology.
Those trees became the fossil fuels we use today.
But they had an impact on the environment, not being carbon neutral they pushed the oxygen level way up - it peaked at almost 40% of the atmosphere. Basically every animal that had thrived before the carboniferous went extinct - and evolution produced new animals that could live in that environment. Book lungs became a lot more efficient and we saw giant insects thriving. There was a dragonfly with a 1m wingspan, and it's likely that the biggest arachnids of all time lived then - it was the one time in history it was possible for a spider to survive if it's much bigger than a tarantula because the atmosphere was so oxygen rich. Sadly spiders don't fossilize well or often so we don't know if there WERE giant spiders, but it's likely.
Eventually new bacteria evolved that COULD digest wood, trees began to rot - and gradually the atmosphere returned to an in-balance level of about 21% oxygen. All the giant insects and arachnids promptly went extinct as their lungs simply could not breath at this new lower level.
The same is true for plants, massive changes in the CO2 level only increase yields for a little while - beyond a given point it greatly REDUCES yields.
We're evolved for the world as it is, within a fairly narrow band and with very gradual change. Rapid change like we're doing now is a nightmare. Sure we could probably adapt, it's probably not an extinction level event for us - but it's going to be massively disruptive. Millions, perhaps billions, will die. Most of them killing each other for resources.
Look at the political fallout that just a few million refugees have caused in Europe (where, in a population of over a billion - they are a rounding error). Can you imagine the outcome of BILLIONS of refugees ?
It's easy to say we can 'adapt' - it's insane to think adapting will be cheaper than replacing fossil fuels, and it's REALLY insane to think it will happen without massive loss of life.
Humanity will (probably) survive, but civilization DEFINITELY cannot.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
A century isn't very long.
"Old man yells at systemd"
Yup. There's a magic lever in the oval office and Trump's going to find it any time now.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
All of which has nothing to do with a company offering training. It's a standard marketing tactic to get people to buy their product - nothing to do with the environment. Software companies do it almost universally.
Per cubic meter mined, yes, uranium mining is far dirtier than coal. But you need to move a lot less rock for uranium mining to produce the same amount of energy, even accounting for the orders-of-magnitude higher tailings fractions in uranium, and the fact that only 0,7% of recovered uranium is U-235, and of that you'll only burn half of it.
It's very difficult to make an actual cost comparison because we do not actually ever clean up our messes from coal or nuclear.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
American companies have ceased investing in workers. They view workers as disposable. Rather than take a solid capable worker and invest in expanding their skillset, they prefer to find younger workers with the existing required skillset, or to import them via H1B Visas.
There is so little training or skill investment by corporations, so little time off thus preventing U.S. workers from training themselves. U.S. workers are used and discarded.
So the irony here is that a Chinese firm is saying to itself, these coal workers are hard workers. They're knowledgeable and skilled in their area. This means they work hard and they can learn. We can use that, and then use them for in-roads into Western nations and markets.
Rather smart...