Obama Declares War on Coal June 2nd

1/3rd of our coal dead in 5 years!
GAH!

I'd link some more, but it is mostly a few thousands words of chronicling "victory" after "victory". :sad:

If this has happened and electricity prices have not gone up much then this means it has worked, right?

I had a quick look to see what has happened to prices, I found this that seems to say that in the last year prices have fallen for all users EXCEPT households. How does that happen? It sounds to me like someone is getting gouged.

Residential April 2014 = 12.30
Residential April 2015 = 12.64

Commercial April 2014 = 10.48
Commercial April 2015 = 10.32

Industrial April 2014 = 12.30
Industrial April 2015 = 12.64

Transportation April 2014 = 10.02
Transportation April 2015 = 9.87
 
That's falling out of state movements in both directions eg New York Maryland Colorado Hawaii going down.

It could be any number of things in each state. Weather differences impacting demand, new market entrants or exits impacting competitiveness, new carbon or renewable energy measures, changing costs of different fuels, changed tarrif structures or regulations, changed allowances for network investment and spending...
 
Why do you think that's bad? There's nothing bad about it all. It's all in the best interest of everyone except the coal industry itself.

Why I think it is bad?
2 reasons.

The first is that natural gas is now the #1 source for USA electricity.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/14/business/natural-gas-overtakes-coal-in-us-electric-generation.html

Natural gas overtook coal as the top source of United States electric power generation for the first time ever this spring, a milestone that has been in the making for years as the price of gas slides and new regulations make coal riskier for power generators. About 31 percent of electric power generation in April came from natural gas, and 30 percent from coal, according to a recently released report from the research company SNL Energy, which used data from the Energy Department. Nuclear power came in third at 20 percent...


...In April 2010, 44 percent of electric power generation came from coal and 22 percent from gas, according to SNL Energy.

Natural gas is the main ingredient for fertilizer.
We should be saving it to make food for the next 1000 years, not burning it as our main energy source. :mad:

And who knows how long the supply will last or how stable the prices are?
We were starting to import natural gas (very difficult!) before the fracking boom started, and that boom peaks in 2020 I think.

Nat gas prices seem to triple every time a major hurricane hits Texas/Louisiana too, unlike coal which is steady.


My 2nd and main problem is that environmentalists try to kill every base load source of energy.

Nuclear? They killed it.
Coal? Killing it.
Natural Gas? Fracking bans and limited supply...

The power grid becomes unstable after > 20% of it runs on renewable energy.
The USA is up to umm, 12% now?

Germany has 30% renewables and coal use is rising dramatically because natural gas is too expensive.
http://junkscience.com/2014/09/25/germany-a-look-at-our-renewable-future/3

3500 emergency grid interventions per year . :eek:
And they are hooked up to Europe with France's massive nuclear power, something the USA can't do.

California might get away with these crazy policies since they can import electricity from other states.
Who will the USA import electricity from when renewables become difficult to manage?
 
Why I think it is bad?
2 reasons.

The first is that natural gas is now the #1 source for USA electricity.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/14/business/natural-gas-overtakes-coal-in-us-electric-generation.html



Natural gas is the main ingredient for fertilizer.
We should be saving it to make food for the next 1000 years, not burning it as our main energy source. :mad:

And who knows how long the supply will last or how stable the prices are?
We were starting to import natural gas (very difficult!) before the fracking boom started, and that boom peaks in 2020 I think.

Nat gas prices seem to triple every time a major hurricane hits Texas/Louisiana too, unlike coal which is steady.


My 2nd and main problem is that environmentalists try to kill every base load source of energy.

Nuclear? They killed it.
Coal? Killing it.
Natural Gas? Fracking bans and limited supply...

The power grid becomes unstable after > 20% of it runs on renewable energy.
The USA is up to umm, 12% now?

Germany has 30% renewables and coal use is rising dramatically because natural gas is too expensive.
http://junkscience.com/2014/09/25/germany-a-look-at-our-renewable-future/3

3500 emergency grid interventions per year . :eek:
And they are hooked up to Europe with France's massive nuclear power, something the USA can't do.

California might get away with these crazy policies since they can import electricity from other states.
Who will the USA import electricity from when renewables become difficult to manage?
Solution, overbuild capacity and work on technology that allows you to create petrol with excess energy, CO2 and water
 
A large proportion of environmentalists, especially in the US, now support nuclear power. It is a rather expensive source of electricity, though, requiring large subsidies to make it competitive with other power sources. I suspect that's been a significant part of why it has fallen out of favor. Then again, every source of power is highly subsidized including fossil fuels along with renewables, so I have no idea how it all works out net of subsidies for everything.

I'm not sure why the Germans are trying to cut out nuclear at the same time they switch heavily to renewables. They've done an excellent job of building out renewables and IIRC now export considerably more electricity than they import. But there's still going to be a problem with baseload power on calm nights and cloudy winter days.
 
The power grid becomes unstable after > 20% of it runs on renewable energy.
The USA is up to umm, 12% now?

Germany has 30% renewables and coal use is rising dramatically because natural gas is too expensive.
http://junkscience.com/2014/09/25/germany-a-look-at-our-renewable-future/3

3500 emergency grid interventions per year . :eek:
And they are hooked up to Europe with France's massive nuclear power, something the USA can't do.
Any article that quotes the lunatics of EIKE as a source should not be taken seriously. The German grid isn't anywhere near "unstable" at 30% renewable energy. We had days with upwards of 50% renewable energy in the grid; and Denmark is approaching 50% renewables on average, with peak days at 100%, without problems.

Yes, there were/are problems, but those are mostly created by "the market" trying to optimize revenue, in disregard of the physical constraints of a grid structure that isn't well matched to the market design.

The "dramatic rise in coal use" is equally bogus, although it's bad enough that it's more or less on the same level for the last few years (brown+black is coal):


The interconnect capacity of our grid to the rest of Europe is too small to buffer large demand/supply spikes; still Germany is a net exporter of electricity in the ballpark of 5% of our annual generation.
 
A large proportion of environmentalists, especially in the US, now support nuclear power. It is a rather expensive source of electricity, though, requiring large subsidies to make it competitive with other power sources. I suspect that's been a significant part of why it has fallen out of favor. Then again, every source of power is highly subsidized including fossil fuels along with renewables, so I have no idea how it all works out net of subsidies for everything.

I'm not sure why the Germans are trying to cut out nuclear at the same time they switch heavily to renewables. They've done an excellent job of building out renewables and IIRC now export considerably more electricity than they import. But there's still going to be a problem with baseload power on calm nights and cloudy winter days.

It's true. I'd have to say that among the more intellectual of environmentalists, nuclear is seen as a really good standby. Plus, we're currently watching experimental Thorium projects in India and China.

Nuclear's biggest problem is NIMBYism
 
Nuclear's biggest problem is that it is incredibly dangerous and any sort of accident is likely to be catastrophic. This is particularly true if the reactor is near active faults.

The second biggest problem is that it creates vast amounts of nuclear waste which take hundreds of years to finally become stable.

The third biggest problem is that it leads to nuclear proliferation. Even the nuclear waste can be extremely dangerous if it falls into the wrong hands because it is quite simple to use it to make dirty bombs.
 
A large proportion of environmentalists, especially in the US, now support nuclear power. It is a rather expensive source of electricity, though, requiring large subsidies to make it competitive with other power sources. I suspect that's been a significant part of why it has fallen out of favor. Then again, every source of power is highly subsidized including fossil fuels along with renewables, so I have no idea how it all works out net of subsidies for everything.
I would like to know how large that proportion actually is. It's a fact that after Chernobyl construction of nukes basically ceased in the OECD countries,

and the recent attempt to reignite it here in Europe resulted in a very small number of reactors that are extremely over budget und years behind schedule, basically bancrupting Areva, the French flagship nuclear corporation.
And to top it off, a new nuke construction in Britain is planned with state and EU subsidies/revenue guarantees that are already much higher that those for renewable projects, and will be obscenely higher after the decade or two it will actually take to build a new nuclear plant.

I'm not sure why the Germans are trying to cut out nuclear at the same time they switch heavily to renewables. They've done an excellent job of building out renewables and IIRC now export considerably more electricity than they import. But there's still going to be a problem with baseload power on calm nights and cloudy winter days.
The topic is complex, but basically it was a combination of Chernobyl and the nuclear wast disposal troubles. The German industry never was really happy with nuclear power either, and had to be massively prodded/subsidizes by the government, though once the plants were build they naturally tried to extract a maximum of profit from them.
The renewable "Energiewende" actually started slightly earlier than the nuclear phaseout, and at the time the idea of transitioning from nuke/lignite baseload and anthracite/natgas peak plants to a renewable fraction of 50-80% with mostly natgas+anthracite as backup looked sound from an engineering point of view.

Unfortunately we are now stuck halfway in between, with a market model eminently unsuited to the current energy mix, which let to the crowding out of the natgas plants, a destruction of much of the Mittelstand renewable industry and the coal power plant operators desperately trying to squeeze every penny out of their old plants by running them flat out, flooding our grumbling neighbours with cheap electricity.
 
Christ are you still on this nonsense Kait? Let's see here.

The *market* has killed nuclear power (or rather rendered it permanently niche), plain and simple. Environmental activists do not have this type of power or influence - nuclear has failed all on its own, without conspiracy. It's hideously expensive, inherently statist, damn near uninsurable, lacks social license, prone to cost blowouts and delays in the majority of cases, probably unable to compete in a renewables-heavy market. It's a woefully inadequate answer to the need to reduce carbon emissions immediately. Especially in all the countries which have no nuclear plants at all.

Actually while we are at it, it's pretty much the market that's diminishing coal use too. A lot of old plants are reaching the end of their lives, and with the shape of the market it just doesn't make sense for anyone to build new ones. There's the ever cheaper cost curve of wind turbines, the likelihood of carbon pricing, the gradual withdrawal of coal's social license and most significantly, a future outlook of an ever greater take up of large intermittent penetration + distributed generation + storage + smart meters and energy efficiency rendering the traditional "baseload" share of the wholesale market nearly obsolete. With all that, there's just very little business case to build new coal power plants, no 30 year profitability projections that make it seem like a good idea.

You don't understand what baseload is. It's a description of a segment of a share of the market in a traditional wholesale market. Not a special kind of extra robust electricity.

Power grid "instability" from +20% intermittent distributed generation is a nonsense if you understand anything about how large AC synchronous grids work. Tokala covered that. Likewise the idea that German coal use has "risen dramatically".
 
Why I think it is bad?
2 reasons.

The first is that natural gas is now the #1 source for USA electricity.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/14/business/natural-gas-overtakes-coal-in-us-electric-generation.html



Natural gas is the main ingredient for fertilizer.
We should be saving it to make food for the next 1000 years, not burning it as our main energy source. :mad:

And who knows how long the supply will last or how stable the prices are?
We were starting to import natural gas (very difficult!) before the fracking boom started, and that boom peaks in 2020 I think.

Nat gas prices seem to triple every time a major hurricane hits Texas/Louisiana too, unlike coal which is steady.


My 2nd and main problem is that environmentalists try to kill every base load source of energy.

Nuclear? They killed it.
Coal? Killing it.
Natural Gas? Fracking bans and limited supply...

The power grid becomes unstable after > 20% of it runs on renewable energy.
The USA is up to umm, 12% now?

Germany has 30% renewables and coal use is rising dramatically because natural gas is too expensive.
http://junkscience.com/2014/09/25/germany-a-look-at-our-renewable-future/3

3500 emergency grid interventions per year . :eek:
And they are hooked up to Europe with France's massive nuclear power, something the USA can't do.

California might get away with these crazy policies since they can import electricity from other states.
Who will the USA import electricity from when renewables become difficult to manage?


None of those are reasons why it's bad.
 
Good, electricity prices should skyrocket. Too many people leave all their lights blazing & pay no mind to efficiency.
Yeah, lets screw the little guy. Power for the 1%!
 
I' surprised that so Americans are willing to go down the path of Europe, where renewable energy has destroyed many countries. Renewable energy is just expensive nonsense.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/obamas-renewable-energy-fantasy-1436104555
f Mr. Obama gets his way, the U.S. will go down the rocky road traveled by the European Union. In 2007 the EU adopted the target of deriving 20% of its energy consumption from renewables by 2020. Europe is therefore around a decade ahead of the U.S. in meeting a more challenging target—the EU’s 20% is of total energy, not just electricity. To see what the U.S. might look like, Europe is a good place to start.

Germany passed its first renewable law in 1991 and already has spent $440 billion (€400 billion) on its so-called Energy Transition. The German environment minister has estimated a cost of up to $1.1 trillion (€1 trillion) by the end of the 2030s. With an economy nearly five times as large as Germany’s and generating nearly seven times the amount of electricity (but a less demanding renewables target), this suggests the cost of meeting Mr. Obama’s pledge is of the order of $2 trillion.

There are other, indirect costs to consider. Germany is the world’s second largest exporter of merchandise, behind China and ahead of the U.S. But high and rising energy costs are driving German companies to locate new capacity overseas.

BASF, which operates the world’s largest integrated chemical facility, is shifting more production to America. “With such a huge difference in energy prices, the decision is clear that the money is now going there,” a BASF executive told a meeting of EU industry ministers last year. BASF has opened plants in Malaysia as well as Louisiana.

Advocates of renewable energy such as Deutsche Bank anticipate that electricity from solar panels will cost the same as electricity from the grid (so-called grid parity) in the not-too-distant future. But none suggest that solar can do so now without subsidies. And as Germany, Britain and other European countries are finding out, overt subsidies are only one part of the cost of renewables.

Most damaging is the effect of renewable mandates on the power stations necessary to ensure the stability of the electric grid and balance supply and demand. Even a modest proportion of wind- and solar-generated electricity prevents gas- and coal-powered stations from recovering their fixed costs. This has led to the proposed shuttering of Irsching in Bavaria, one of Germany’s newest and most efficient gas-fired plants. So unless conventional capacity also is subsidized, at some point the lights will start going out. European politicians have no answer to a problem they created, and it’s a safe bet the EPA doesn’t either.
The economic reality will come and bite people hard.
 
I would like to know how large that proportion actually is.
It's much larger than it used to be but is still very much a minority. My impression is that pro-nuclear stances are more common among North Americans with a science background than in the environmental movement as a whole.
It's a fact that after Chernobyl construction of nukes basically ceased in the OECD countries,

and the recent attempt to reignite it here in Europe resulted in a very small number of reactors that are extremely over budget und years behind schedule, basically bancrupting Areva, the French flagship nuclear corporation.
And to top it off, a new nuke construction in Britain is planned with state and EU subsidies/revenue guarantees that are already much higher that those for renewable projects, and will be obscenely higher after the decade or two it will actually take to build a new nuclear plant.
I suppose the question is: why did it used to be possible to build nuclear plants without breaking the bank, but no longer is? Was the regulatory environment tightened up everywhere so dramatically after Chernobyl that new plants became economically impossible to construct, or were other factors involved?

If it is mostly a story of regulation, and if we lived in a world where this was politically possible, it would make sense to me to relax regulations back to the standard of c. 1975. This would sound reckless to some people, but their safety record so far has been quite impressive, easily beating coal even without considering climate change. To my mind some new nuclear construction is worth the trade-off, provided that the economics aren't completely absurd for reasons other than regulation. I'd much rather they be Gen III or better, of course, but even older versions might make sense if the cost of new models is prohibitive.

The German solution of rapidly shutting down all nukes causes emissions to be considerably higher than they would be if the nuclear plants were still operating and coal plants (especially the ones burning lignite) were shut down instead. But I can grant that, on some level, this makes more sense than what the rest of the developed world is doing. Leaving aging nukes running past their designed ~60-year lifespans while de-facto preventing new ones from being built is the worst of all possible worlds from a safety standpoint, and Germany is at least avoiding that.

The topic is complex, but basically it was a combination of Chernobyl and the nuclear wast disposal troubles. The German industry never was really happy with nuclear power either, and had to be massively prodded/subsidizes by the government, though once the plants were build they naturally tried to extract a maximum of profit from them.
The renewable "Energiewende" actually started slightly earlier than the nuclear phaseout, and at the time the idea of transitioning from nuke/lignite baseload and anthracite/natgas peak plants to a renewable fraction of 50-80% with mostly natgas+anthracite as backup looked sound from an engineering point of view.

Unfortunately we are now stuck halfway in between, with a market model eminently unsuited to the current energy mix, which let to the crowding out of the natgas plants, a destruction of much of the Mittelstand renewable industry and the coal power plant operators desperately trying to squeeze every penny out of their old plants by running them flat out, flooding our grumbling neighbours with cheap electricity.
So how can the market for renewables be improved? My impression is that economic problems do show up as the fraction of solar and wind is increased to something like 20-30%, because sunny/windy conditions result in a large supply of energy available all at once. Although the grid could still handle it, this crashes the spot price and makes it hard for solar and wind to become profitable on average even once they've reached relatively high penetrations. Of course if you've also got coal producing flat out, the problem would get even worse.

Is this currently happening in Germany or is this effect not large enough to cause serious problems? Also, what do you mean by the Mittelstand renewable industry? Were there significant medium-sized domestic manufacturers who suffered once China started producing cheaper solar panels, or smaller-scale utilities that can't compete at the current sizes?

Also, is it possible to subsidize/cut taxes on the natural gas operators while taxing coal, in order to keep the gas plants afloat? Although of course the very high gas prices there are going to seriously hurt gas no matter what you do. Y'all need to start fracking everything in sight like we do! ;)
 
It's much larger than it used to be but is still very much a minority. My impression is that pro-nuclear stances are more common among North Americans with a science background than in the environmental movement as a whole.
Okay, this sounds like it isn't that much of a difference compared to us here.
I suppose the question is: why did it used to be possible to build nuclear plants without breaking the bank, but no longer is? Was the regulatory environment tightened up everywhere so dramatically after Chernobyl that new plants became economically impossible to construct, or were other factors involved?

If it is mostly a story of regulation, and if we lived in a world where this was politically possible, it would make sense to me to relax regulations back to the standard of c. 1975. This would sound reckless to some people, but their safety record so far has been quite impressive, easily beating coal even without considering climate change. To my mind some new nuclear construction is worth the trade-off, provided that the economics aren't completely absurd for reasons other than regulation. I'd much rather they be Gen III or better, of course, but even older versions might make sense if the cost of new models is prohibitive.
I strongly suspect nuclear power never was as cheap as it was presented to the public in the first place.
As I mentioned, the situation here was that Big Energy didn't want nukes at all, and had to "convinced" by a big stick and lots and lots of carrots to built them.
The government wanted them, because they wanted the option to swiftly built nuclear weaponry if necessary. So we not only got nuclear power plants, but also a (abortive) fast breeder and a even more abortive nuclear reprocessing facility.
Nuke plant have massively frontloaded costs, so once they were built and the initial problems were ironed out, everyone was happy with them. Until the nuclear waste started to pile up, and nobody was able to find a satisfying solution for disposing of it.

Somewhere in the late 70s our energy consumption started to basically flatline, and the demographic transition was well underway. So the prospects for multi-billion-Deutschmark investments in power generation that would need decades to pay of wasn't really that attractive anymore.
If there would be the need to expand baseload power, our plentiful and cheap lignite was the the more economic alternative.

So our last batch of nuclear powerplants started construction in 1982, and the planning process for those probably in the mid-to-late 70s, about a decade before Chernobyl. As far as I know, there were never plans for new batch of nukes after that.

For a more global perspective, I suspect the changes in "economics fashion" in the last few decades were much more lethal to nuclear power than over-enthusiastic regulations.
"The markets" are mostly looking for the quick buck, not for multi-decadal investment schemes.
The big utilities that once were either state-run or basically oligopolies backed by government guarantees for ROI have to actually care about profitability now, and nuclear power simply isn't making the cut, given the alternatives.
So the only nukes built/planned right now are still backed and/or paid for governments one way or the other, regardless of how tough regulations are in the respective country.

As far as older western nuke designs are concerned, I suspect this is about as feasible as resurrecting the Saturn V. Technology and corporate culture has moved on, and you had to reinvent them from scratch anyway. To keep with the rocketry comparison, you would have to buy a Proton/Saljut from the Russians to really keep the costs low.
And for most of the countries that stopped building nukes 30 years ago, you have the problem of a vanishing skilled workforce for operating the plants. The US probably doesn't have that problem, due to its vast fleet of nuclear powered warships, though.

The German solution of rapidly shutting down all nukes causes emissions to be considerably higher than they would be if the nuclear plants were still operating and coal plants (especially the ones burning lignite) were shut down instead. But I can grant that, on some level, this makes more sense than what the rest of the developed world is doing. Leaving aging nukes running past their designed ~60-year lifespans while de-facto preventing new ones from being built is the worst of all possible worlds from a safety standpoint, and Germany is at least avoiding that.
"Rapidly" is stretching it a bit. Initially, the nuclear phaseout was enacted in 2000, with 2 reactors shut down in 2003 and 2005, the rest to be gradually shut down between 2010 and 2021. Plenty of time to plan for replacements.
But Big Energy was betting on getting that phaseout revoked by a new government, and they got it in 2010.
Only to get an about-face only one year later (after Fukushima), and now the phaseout was indeed looking rushed, with 7 reactors shut down basically instantly, and the rest to follow within 10 years.
The initial idea of the Energiewende was to shut down both nuke and lignite plants, and replace that with renewables and gas powered plants.
But somehow, nobody bothered to actually design a new electricity market that was actually suited to that vision.

So how can the market for renewables be improved? My impression is that economic problems do show up as the fraction of solar and wind is increased to something like 20-30%, because sunny/windy conditions result in a large supply of energy available all at once. Although the grid could still handle it, this crashes the spot price and makes it hard for solar and wind to become profitable on average even once they've reached relatively high penetrations. Of course if you've also got coal producing flat out, the problem would get even worse.
Yeah, and it doesn't even take 20% intermittent renewables to run into this problem.

Is this currently happening in Germany or is this effect not large enough to cause serious problems?
Exactly that is happening here. We are stuck between a rock and a hard place, with the traditional large utilities (we have basically a 4-way oligopoly) sleepwalking towards bankruptcy, desperately yelling for the government to stop renewable expansion and prod them up them with subsidies for their unprofitable plants.
The Big Four were surprised by the speed with which solar took off between 2009 and 2012, basically eliminating the midday peak in the summer half year, and killing profitability for any gas plant that wasn't used for co-generation anyway.
And they didn't really took the steady increase in on-shore windpower serious either; that now is choking their baseload plants, too.

Also, what do you mean by the Mittelstand renewable industry? Were there significant medium-sized domestic manufacturers who suffered once China started producing cheaper solar panels, or smaller-scale utilities that can't compete at the current sizes?
Now that our Big Energy has woken up, it has used its lobbying power to basically kill both solar and on-shore wind, just at the time it would have been able to compete on a lifetime $/EUR per kWh base. Solar cost came crashing down tremendously the last few years and on-shore wind has been competetive already for years.
But as you noted, in a traditional, merit-order based electricity marked solar and wind power will get killed by its own success, regardless of how cheap it is.

Solar panel production in Germany was indeed killed by Chinese manufacturers, but there's much more than just the panels to solar power.
At the moment you can get residential and small business sized rooftop PV for 1000-1500 €/kW nameplate capacity (depending on size and location), panel cost are in the 500€/kW ballpark. A lot of the difference is local labor cost, i.e. potentially creating jobs in Germany.
It looked even better for wind power, as rotor blades typically are too large to produce them overseas, and Germany is a leading country in generator manufacturing anyway. So an even larger fraction of costs were going into the local economy for wind power.
But pretty much all the companies involved in solar and wind installations are small to medium businesses without much lobbying power, so solar is pretty much dead in the water with tens of thousand of jobs lost in a few years, and on-shore wind is in its last gasps this year, probably dead next year, too.
But at least the rest of the world can now enjoy cheap renewable energy, after we have coughed up much of the expense to scale it up to economic feasibility :p

Off-shore wind of taking off an the other hand, although it's roughly twice as expensive as on-shore, again thanks to the lobbying efforts of the traditional energy sector.

Also, is it possible to subsidize/cut taxes on the natural gas operators while taxing coal, in order to keep the gas plants afloat? Although of course the very high gas prices there are going to seriously hurt gas no matter what you do. Y'all need to start fracking everything in sight like we do! ;)
It would be, if our biggest strip-mine/lignite plant operator wasn't also basically keeping half the cities in western Germany afloat with his taxes and dividends ;).
Most of our current electricity market problems would vanish if half the lignite plants were shut down (yes, our spare capacity is THAT high), but nobody is willing to eat that bullet for the team.

And I think over there you are just starting to notice that fracking isn't the magic bullet it's marketed to be, aren't you;)
 
The nuclear waste issue is not as difficult as it is often portrayed. While there are potential problems with salt dome storage, the problems are manageable.

Political issues are more important. No one wants it nearby.

J
 
I will repeat what I posted last year:

This discussion has been a long time coming. I lived in West Virginia for almost my entire childhood and I am disgusted at the situation. Coal Mining employed 125,000 people in ~1960, now it employs only 30,000. Yet Big Coal STILL rules the state with an iron fist. They own all the politicians on both sides of the aisle, you literally cannot tell the difference when Republicans and Democrats lay out their campaign platforms. It's painfully sad to watch Republicans brag about how revolutionary it will be when reactionary pro-King Coal Republicans replace reactionary Pro-King Coal Democrats as they seem set to do this mid-term.

Teenagers are lead to believe that they can drop out of high school and get a 50k-a-year job without a high school diploma. When they discover otherwise, big-coal pols make sure they blame environmentalists and alternative energy instead of the people who sold them the pie-in-the-sky job offers to begin with.

Other major industries are not allowed in, otherwise they would compete for land and the ears of local politicians. They claim that they are the only industry capable of employing locals and that they do everything they can to help the environment, then they turn around and replace underground mines that employ 300 men and do nothing to the mountaintop above, and replace them with strip mines that employ 10 people and destroy the mountains in the geological/ecological equivalent of a smash and grab.

Most people out in the coalfields get their water from wells rather than utilities. The strip mines poison the streams, giving people a medical encyclopedia's worth of diseases. "Freedom Industries" and other companies have already been discussed on this board. Long time residents know this is nothing new.

Most locals have been brainwashed to believe that coal will never die, that it is the only thing that keeps West Virginia from falling off the face of the Earth. They whinge about how America would fall apart if it weren't for coal, yet coal's share of the market is shrinking with every day that passes, losing out to more efficient nonrenewable sources like Natural Gas as well as alternative energy like Wind and Solar. I know how humiliating it is to be pitied, but I can't view these people with any other feeling. They've been indoctrinated for so many generations they know of no other way of life besides coal mining.

This will end either of two ways: News industries will break Big Coal's monopoly on the state economy and the competing influences help people break out of the indoctrination cycle (The Eastern Panhandle is already like this because it was never big on coal to begin with and is slowly progressing in the same direction as NoVa), or the Coal runs out and the companies leave the state in a condition that makes Somalia look like the Nordic Countries and search for that nasty rock elsewhere.

On an emotional level, I want to believe it's the former, but I have no evidence so far to contradict it being the latter.

In retrospect, while the end for coal is coming sooner than I would have thought, in some ways I'm glad it's coming sooner rather than later so that the recovery will be sooner.
 
I' surprised that so Americans are willing to go down the path of Europe, where renewable energy has destroyed many countries. Renewable energy is just expensive nonsense.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/obamas-renewable-energy-fantasy-1436104555

The economic reality will come and bite people hard.

You seem to waffle about whether you care about the poor or not. Either Germany pays, or the poor people pay. You need to realize that's the choice.

Sometimes you'll handwring about how the poor will be affected by carbon emissions. But when the rich limit their emissions, you handwring about them.

The consequence of your position is poor people get poorer. I wish you'd realize that. Now, of course anti-carbon policies have the potential to disproportionately hurt the poor. So, we avoid those policies, and use alternatives.

The anti-poor people 'solutions' are what the right-wing is going to agitate for after they admit AGW is a concern - they're already yowling about how the average Indian is emitting 40% of what they are. They'll then try to ban poor people from doing what they did, and not pay for what they themselves did.

It might just be a bad understanding of economics. Subsidies don't 'ruin' economies. Many types of subsidies are perfectly sustainable. If this weren't true, we'd force kids to pay for their own grade school education. Or, at least borrow for it.
 
Appalachia is screwed, but not because of this. The dollar is strong, hurting imports. Gallons of cheap, clean natural gas is coming online every day. Further, most coal from the US is strip-mined out west, not deep-mined in the mountains.

Complain all you want, but it is not like things were hunky-dorie in the coal fields until this came along.
 
Here's a graph of UK coal mining jobs over time:

Spoiler UK coal mining jobs, 1880-present :


The political circumstances are different, but I think the overall economic picture for Appalachia in the early 21st century is pretty similar to that of the late-20th century UK coal mining regions. The reason for the decline is fundamentally economic in both cases, with politics only acting to hasten the last phase of a decline already decades in the making.

Does anyone know if any substantial new industry has yet appeared in the old British coal areas? My impression is that they are still economically depressed, but I don't know the UK well enough to know if there might be places doing substantially better. If there are, perhaps the same approach could be tried in WV, KY, et al. If there aren't, the picture will likely continue to be bleak for Appalachia as they go through the terminal phase of the same decline.
 
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