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White House Reportedly Exploring Wartime Rule To Help Coal, Nuclear (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: According to reports from Bloomberg and E&E News, the Trump Administration has been exploring another way to help coal and nuclear generators: the Defense Production Act of 1950. The Act was passed under President Truman. Motivated by the Korean War, it allows the president broad authority to boost U.S. industries that are considered a priority for national security. On Thursday, E&E News cited sources that said "an interagency process is underway" at the White House to examine possible application of the act to the energy industry. The goal would be to give some form of preference to coal and nuclear plants that are struggling to compete with cheap natural gas.
If the DOE decides not to invoke Section 202(c), the president may turn to the Defense Production Act. According to a 2014 summary report (PDF) from the Congressional Research Service (CRS), the act would allow the president to "demand priority for defense-related products," "provide incentives to develop, modernize, and expand defense productive capacity," and establish "a voluntary reserve of trained private sector executives available for emergency federal employment," among other powers. (Some even more permissive applications of the Act were terminated in 1957.) Using the Act to protect coal and nuclear facilities would almost certainly be more controversial, as the link between national defense and keeping uneconomic coal generators running is not well-established. The Administration could apply the Act to "provide or guarantee loans to industry" for material-specific deliveries and production. "The president may also authorize the purchase of 'industrial items or technologies for installation in government or private industrial facilities,'" reports Ars.
If the DOE decides not to invoke Section 202(c), the president may turn to the Defense Production Act. According to a 2014 summary report (PDF) from the Congressional Research Service (CRS), the act would allow the president to "demand priority for defense-related products," "provide incentives to develop, modernize, and expand defense productive capacity," and establish "a voluntary reserve of trained private sector executives available for emergency federal employment," among other powers. (Some even more permissive applications of the Act were terminated in 1957.) Using the Act to protect coal and nuclear facilities would almost certainly be more controversial, as the link between national defense and keeping uneconomic coal generators running is not well-established. The Administration could apply the Act to "provide or guarantee loans to industry" for material-specific deliveries and production. "The president may also authorize the purchase of 'industrial items or technologies for installation in government or private industrial facilities,'" reports Ars.
Yeah. Because of fracking in the USA and Russian natural gas producers and others World wide, the price of Natural Gas plummeted to where is was much cheaper than coal. Power plants that had no legal reason to do so, switched to NG because it was cheaper.
The Free Market in action.
But it hurt the coal miners. And they paid off certain Senators like, Mitch McConnell and Orin Hatch to lie and say the Obama administration started a "war on coal." (He backtracked after Trump was elected.)
Hannity and Limbaugh (both liars themselves) propagated the lie among their gullible listeners as well as Trolls on facecbook and other places.
Bit as we see, it was all the coal miners bribing Republican Senators to keep their outdated business profitable for themselves.
A big issue is this: Coal has been steadily automating its mining systems. In 1950 underground mining was at the rate of 0.68 tons per man hour and surface mining was at the rate of 1.9 tons/manhour. By 2011 underground mining was at the rate of 2.76 tons/man hour and surface mining was at 8.8 tons/man hour. There were productivity peaks in 2003 of 4.04 and 10.75 tons/man hour.
So assuming coal had maintained the same level of production between 1950 and 2011, the coal industry would have shed 75% of its manpower due to automation and has proven it can get to 80% reduction if it needs to. Then add in the reduction in coal consumption and it is a no-brainer as to why no one is being hired to work in the mines.
So it Trump tries to boost coal consumption (which is the goal of his actions here); more coal may get produced and purchased, but very few additional workers will be hired. If anything, the mine owners will buy more automated equipment.
Its not like any local town is going to build a coal power plant. Those take years of planning, approvals, oversight, and construction. Power plant planning and construction can easily take five to ten years, beginning to end. So any of this "make people buy more coal" rhetoric is not going to produce more jobs in any of the coal towns that are out there.
Cited Reference:
https://www.eia.gov/totalenerg...
Architectural plans are like computer source code with a couple of differences: You only compile once.
Start reading here: https://phys.org/news/2015-02-...
If that's not enough, read all the good science referenced here: http://iopscience.iop.org/arti...
If you've gotten this far and still are unconvinced, you must not believe in the scientific method of thought or are in the extreme minority, more here on that topic: https://climate.nasa.gov/scien...
One does not have to be a scientist to know that something is terribly wrong.
Happy earth day.
Greed is the root of all evil.
Lets put it that way: The Greenhouse Effect is a wellknown phenomenon since at least 150 years (hey, we build greenhouses for some reason!). And of course every material that has different absorbtion properties at different frequencies comes with a greenhouse effect, because it is transparent to some frequencies and absorbs energy at other frequencies. Thus energy that at one frequency passes the layer gets trapped at other frequencies. Glass for instance is very transparent for electromagnetic waves from the visual spectrum, but is not for frequencies of the thermal spectrum. That's why we build greenhouses with glass roofs. Because of Ludwig Boltzmann's, Josef Stefan's and Gustav Kirchhoff's work, we know the distribution of the frequency of a Black Body's radiation, and we know, that Earth at a surface temperature of 290 K on average radiates its thermal energy at frequencies (Kirchhoff's Law, Planck's Law) where carbon dioxide, vapor and methane are absorbing electromagnetic waves. On the other hand, the Sun (with a surface temperature of 5700 K) emits its energy at much higher frequencies, for which most atmospheric gases are transparent. The Sun's energy enters the Earth's atmosphere at frequencies close to the visual spectrum, the light gets absorbed at the Earth's surface and heats it up to 255 K (on average). Then the Earth radiates the energy, but the atmosphere is intransparent at thermal frequencies due to the presence of vapor, carbon dioxide and methane. Only if Earth gets heated up due to the trapped energy to 290 K, it radiates enough energy to get into a thermal equilibrium.
That's the greenhouse effect on Earth. We have greenhouse effects at the other planets too, if they have an atmosphere. Venus is famous for its strong greenhouse effect which causes Venus's surface to have temperatures above 700 K. Mars has a greenhouse effect too, but because of the thin atmosphere, it's quite small and increases the surface temperature about 20 K above the Black Body temperature.
The current greenhouse effect of Earth is about 35 K, but it is highly dependent on the actual atmospheric composition. Changing the makeup of the atmosphere changes the strength of the greenhouse effect.
DNS-and-BIND blithered:
Before the Syrian civil war, two pipelines were proposed by Qatar to get gas to Europe. Going through Syria. Now, don't forget, Qatar are (were) major Clinton Foundation donors. Iran, a Russian ally, also proposed a pipeline. It also went through Syria. Guess which one Assad approved?
Oh, for pity's sake!
The Clinton Foundation's relationship with Qatar had NOTHING to do with Assad's decision. Instead, as is the case with Middle Eastern politics in general, Islamic sectarianism was the deciding factor.
Qatar is and, since the expansion of Islam beyond what are now the Saudi cities of Mecca and Medina, has always been ruled and principally inhabited by Sunni muslims. Syria is (and has been, ever since the Assad clan and its associated Ba'ath Party came to power) a Sunni-majority "nation" (if you're unclear why I put that term in quotes, go look up the Balfour Declaration for background on why "national" borders across the Middle East are arbitrary constructs that exist because of British arrogance, rather than naturally-derived nations that emerged from the traditional tribal and sectarian divisions in the region), ruled by an authoritarian, Shia-minority government that exerts control over the Sunni majority via oppression and terror. (In effect, it's a mirror image of the Iraqi power structure under Saddam Hussein, where a Sunni minority ruled a Shia majority via the same strategy.)
The Assad clan chose the Iranian pipeline proposal because it has, ever since Iran's (Shia) Islamic Revolution of 1979, ALWAYS been an Iranian client state (as is the Hezboll'ah quasi-state in the Bekaa Valley region of Lebanon, which both Syria and Iran support with money and arms) and ally. There was never any serious possibility that the Assads would accept the Qatari proposals, because that would have obligated them to Sunni bankers - and, in the Middle East, such obligations always come with unpublicized, but very real political strings.
Not to mention such an arrangement would have publicly humiliated the Iranian mullahs - which would have been unwise for an authoritarian state that depended heavily on arms and oil money from Iran to maintain its control over its own people and its supply pipline to its Hezboll'ah co-clients.
This kind of myopic, USA-centric, profound misunderstanding of Middle Eastern politics, and its concomittant ignorance of how power actually works in the Islamic world is why we had no business whatsoever invading Iraq, why our experiment in enforced regime change in Libya backfired so spectacularly, and why allowing ourselves to be drawn into the developing quagmire in Syria is such a Really Bad Idea. We have NO idea what the fuck we're doing there, and our accumulated previous experience should have (but clearly has not) taught us that thrusting our military dick into the Middle East without a Waterford-clear idea of what we're trying to accomplish, precisely how we propose to accomplish it, exactly who the other players are (and what their respective power bases and goals are), and a precisely-defined exit strategy in hand, is arrogant foolishness of the very highest order.
And it's essentially begging to be taught that lesson yet again, in the most humiliating and expensive way possible ...
Check out my novel.