cartechboy writes
"What's $50 billion among friends, right? At least Felix Kramer and Gil Friend are thinking big, so there is that. The pair have published an somewhat audacious proposal to spend $50 billion dollars to buy up and then shut down every single private and public coal company operating in the United States. The scientific benefits: eliminating acid rain, airborne emissions, etc). The shutdown proposal includes the costs of retraining for the approximately 87,000 coal-industry workers who would lose their jobs over the proposed 10-year phaseout of coal. Since Kramer and Friend don't have $50 billion, they suggest the concept could be funded as a public service and if governments can't do it maybe some rich guys can — and the names Gates, Buffett and Bloomberg come up. Any takers?"
Re:This is more than a little bit naive.
By rnturn
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2014-Mar-12 14:58
• Score: 4, Interesting
• Thread
``Article is ignorant of how the coal industry works.''
I suspect the authors are totally aware of how the coal industry works. That's what they're trying to fix. Like you, I didn't take the time to read the whole article (maybe later) but I was appalled when I had to fly over West Virgina years ago and saw the damage to the forests (take the trip in a small plane so you can see the effects close up) that acid rain and the beginnings of mountaintop removal was causing. It makes you sick to see it and it's only gotten worse. I have to wonder if the metallurgical need for coal couldn't be satisfied by some of the extraction methods that are less destructive to the environment. Mining will always be messy but is something like mountaintop removal really necessary? If we think it's okay to take a huge area and render it uninhabitable by human beings -- like what's happening to parts of Appalachia -- then I guess we'll all get what we deserve. All in the name of cheap power. (And I don't know about you but my electric power rates go up -- never down -- every year regardless of the amount of coal that we're clawing out of the ground.) Then do we use the $50B to relocate all the people in Appalachia to other parts of the country where they won't be poisoned? That won't work either.
Personally, I'd like to see coal powered plants disappear as fast as humanly possible. Unfortunately, until we can create a critical mass of renewable power that can be intelligently shuffled around to meet local demands, we're kind of stuck with it. Unless we can work up the political will to take the first (and second) steps. The coal industry would like that to never happen.
Re:This is more than a little bit naive.
By AlphaWolf_HK
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2014-Mar-12 15:03
• Score: 5, Insightful
• Thread
Or to be more precisely, how alternative goods/resources work.
If you take away 37% of the supply of electricity, it will need to be replaced. This means that alternatives to coal will go up in price, and your electricity costs will go up with them. These hipsters might talk all day about saving the rainforest, but in reality they'll never go a day without their ipads and a working espresso machine.
That would actually be a great opportunity for nuclear, however I have a feeling that these guys would hate nuclear even more than coal (I know it's stereotyping, but their type usually does and you'd be hard pressed to argue otherwise.)
Kind of a side rant, but I'm not sure what the ultimate purpose of preventing man-made global warming is supposed to be. The best argument I've heard is to prevent the loss of landmass to rising sea water, but that's already going to happen anyways (less than 100k years ago Los Angeles was under water, and no matter what we do it will one day again be under water.) Higher global temperatures have historically resulted in more arable land rather than simple increased droughts. If you want more physical landmass, then you'll need to drop the climate to ice age levels where biodiversity actually tends to suffer. During the age of dinosaurs, the carbon dioxidie PPM was 18 times higher than it is now, biodiversity was at one of its peaks, the overall climate was 8C warmer, and plantlife was more abundant than ever. In other words, history has shown that a warmer planet is literally a more green one.
So what kind of disaster is anti-climate change supposed to avert again?
Re:This is more than a little bit naive.
By gurps_npc
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2014-Mar-12 15:13
• Score: 5, Insightful
• Thread
While it is true that theoretically scientifically, we have clean coal technologies available, Coal is still the dirtiest and worst of the power technologies.
This is because of two reasons. 1) Truly clean coal technologies are expensive - more expensive than solar powered or wind power. So practically nobody uses it. and
2) Coal companies - more than any other power industry - have found ways to avoid complying with regulations. Specifically, they campaigned hard to allow existing plants to go unregulated until after they 'modernized' in the normal course of time. Then they refused to modernize - for the past 60 years.
Tuna fish is one of the healthiest cheap foods you can eat - or rather would be EXCEPT for the mercury in it which comes from coal. Coal burning plants are more radioactive than nuclear power plants because small bits of thorium are in coal and when you burn it, it gets wafted up into the air and settles around the coal plant. Not to mention the acid rain and the green house gas issues.
Re:This is more than a little bit naive.
By JoeMerchant
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2014-Mar-12 15:51
• Score: 5, Interesting
• Thread
The article is a summary of a larger proposal. Even in the article, they state that power generation will be transitioned to other fuels / sources, workers retrained, etc.
Even if the larger proposal is less than perfect, it is examining relative costs and benefits of keeping vs. shutting down the coal industry. From their perspective, every dollar spent in closing down the coal industry will be paid back 2-3x in reduced costs like pollution, healthcare, etc. even after accounting for the increased cost of electricity and other items.
TL;DR: coal costs us more to keep than to get rid of.
Remember lead in paint and gasoline? Accurately accounting for the social/economic benefits of the lead phase out is impossible, but overall it is becoming quite clear that the lead phase-out was a win. Same for asbestos, CFCs and PCBs. For me, the jury is still out over removing arsenic from treated wood, but I think I can agree with their forecasting on coal. As for smaller scale uses of coal, those could continue, and yes, prices might rise in the short term, but actually, those industries would benefit in the longer term due to the reduced demand for coal for power, and therefore longer lifetime of the non-renewable resource.
Re:This is more than a little bit naive.
By Charliemopps
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2014-Mar-12 15:51
• Score: 4, Insightful
• Thread
The coal mines don't own the coal. The states do. The mines buy permits to mine it. As soon as one mine is gone, that permit is open for whomever wants to show up and take over.
What are all the families that heat their homes with coal going to do? Are you going to buy them all new furnaces and pipe natural gas up the mountain to them? Oh, but natural gas isn't green is it? So you're going to install solar panels on their land? where does it end?
Lastly, do you think Virginia is going to allow this at all? Shuttering their biggest industry? Not a chance in hell.