The article discusses re-branding the clean energy industry so it is as American as the interstate highway system and the jobs that it provides are as valuable as those in the automotive or coal mining sectors but didn't go so far as to suggest what that branding could be.
A television ad campaign showing lots of blue and white collar workers at solar farms, wind farms, and hydro plants performing various maintenance, construction, and engineering activities might help more than the shots of wilderness and nature that seem to be designed to appeal to environmentalists more than the average joe. need a slogan and an audio signature (a la intel bong or netflix drum) and clean green power could become the engine powering America's future!
Very good point, the political power of coal seems to be as much about cultural concepts of masculinity as anything else. It already employs many fewer people than alternative technogies:
I also wonder whether the talk of coal being dirty and dangerous actually boosts its appeal to some voters. At the least solar and wind need to be seen as rugged. Maybe they should also play up scale, the latest offshore wind turbines, for instance, are absolutely massive.
> I also wonder whether the talk of coal being dirty and dangerous actually boosts its appeal to some voters.
For example, see the attitudes around "Rollin' Coal". Practitioners cite "American freedom" and a stand against "rampant environmentalism" as reasons for coal rolling (aka "Prius repellent"). I'm not sure what argument one could make to change a coal roller's mind.
Someone who's gone to the trouble of modifying their vehicle in that manner may be beyond the point of reasonable discussion. On the other hand, that's likely to be a pretty small proportion of people, overall.
You could certainly appeal to their appreciation for reliability. Consider this, does an electric vehicle have ANY emissions reducing equipment at all that one must maintain?
The unreliability of the emissions gear is usually what comes up when I talk to diesel folks. Rolling coal is a fun extra for them.
Just musing now, but the diesel guys today seem to say a lot of the same things the gas guys said in the 80s with their EGRs and cats and vacuum lines galore under the hood destroying their reliability. Gas got variable timing and direct injection, and is no longer so fragile. Maybe there's some room left for innovation there, maybe not.
> In 1985 the Texas Department of Transportation asked Mike Blair and Tim McClure of GSD&M to create a slogan for an anti-littering campaign. McClure said that "bubbas in pickup trucks" who regularly littered beer cans and other items out of vehicle windows and ordinary Texans who believed that littering was a "God-given right" were targets of the advertising campaign. ... McClure recalled that "The crowd was sprinkled with 'Keep America Beautiful' and 'Keep Texas Beautiful' folks, and our audience is 18-to-24 young males." McClure added that "The 'Keep Texas Beautiful' lady said, 'Can we at least say please?' I said, 'No ma'am, you cannot use the line if you put please in front of it.'
So first, the author Jigar Shah is a heavy-hitter in the energy industry and knows what he's talking about. He founded SunEdison in the early 2000's and popularized solar-as-a-service PPA's (SunEdison pays the upfront capital costs to install solar on your roof and you pay it back by paying them for the electricity you consume at lower prices than the utility but still high enough to pay back with margins). Today he runs a big cleantech investment firm.
But this article is also two years old. When it was written, coal-vs-cleantech was a big campaign issue for example.
This isn't because of "clean jobs" or a nationwide coordinated renewable push (there isn't one, and Trump has done his best to cut whatever marginal subsidies exist). It's because renewable is now the cheapest form of new energy. The beancounters love it. Conservative Texas is the largest windfarm state in the country.
This shouldn't be surprising -- renewables are largely manufacturing-based industries where the more we build, the better we get at building it and the cheaper it becomes. Compare that to fracking where the half-life of a fracking well is 2-4 years -- after 2-4 years, the well contains half as much oil as it did, and what's left becomes harder and more expensive to extract (compare that to a saudi oil well that has half-life measured in decades and that should tell you something about the "fracking revolution" vs "fracking boom", but I digress...)
Point is, we're now at the turning point where the economics of renewable just make sense. The rebranding as An American Thing was a good talking point two years ago (and still room for it, tbh), but costs are now the more interesting story.
I would also like to see the environmental groups and the left in general stop branding coal as somehow immoral. How about instead trying to make coal compete on level ground: tax its carbon emissions, tax its particulate emissions, require real management for whatever waste it produces, and see if any investors or inventors want to keep it alive.
If the CO2 emissions could be adequately captured, the particulates scrubbed, and the fly ash turned into concrete [0], there may very well be a place for coal for hundreds of years.
[0] Fly ash appears to be a pretty good replacement for a large amount of Portland cement, and the latter also comes with quite a bit of CO2 emissions.
Unfortunately in the real world, with the best available technology, mining coal is dirty, the particulates can't be fully scrubbed, and coal ash is toxic.
There were some stories about a Chinese coal plant manager who made "clean coal" (claims of near 100% clean). Never saw anyone debunking it. I wish to know how true the claims are.
Your efforts to illustrate potential solutions to coal’s issues at the point of consumption fail to consider production-side problems such as strip mining, slurry pits and ground water contamination.
This paper [1] is pretty interesting RE: the effects of fly ash in concrete mixes. It isn't a replacement, certainly, and brings both problems and benefits.
The environmental impact is one thing, but I would argue consuming coal unnecessarily is immoral because coal is not easily replaceable. If you cut down a bunch of trees, at least you can replace them in few decades. How long does it take coal to form? Thousands? Millions of years? My point is, one you burn coal, you can't get is back.
Coal can apparently form after "only" many thousands of years, but most of today's mined coal seems to come from the Carboniferous (290-360 Million years ago) and the Cretaceous period (69-144 Million years ago).[0]
I agree with your philosophical stance, however carbon taxes are unfortunately a pipe dream in the US, at least. Look at Washington, a liberal bastion, which was not even close to passing their carbon tax ballot initiative. In this political climate and this atmosphere of denial and propaganda, unfortunately morality is one of the only actually effective weapons left to those who actually care about the environment and the planet. It's all fine and good to prefer a carbon tax, but if that's all you push for, NOTHING has gotten done in this country on that score.
The other ways to make a difference, besides pushing hard against the very negative and misery-causing emissions, are to innovate tech, to make clean energy experiences better for consumers, and to push tangentially related policies like EV credits, solar credits, and other policies which help non-toxic energy sources.
" tax its carbon emissions, tax its particulate emissions, require real management for whatever waste it produces, and see if any investors or inventors want to keep it alive."
Actually, this is exactly what environmentalists have been trying to do. This is what the cap and trade system which has been pushed by various environmental organisations was all about. But of course it was blocked by conservatives paid by the energy industry.
There is one rare fact that both environmentalists and coal executives agree on -- if the coal industry is forced to pay for their emissions it will die. So I can confidently answer your question -- there would be no investors wanting to keep it alive.
Furthermore, the US government has spent literary billions of taxpayer money to make coal environmentally acceptable. All kinds of schemes have been tried -- carbon capture, coal liquification, coal gasification, etc. None of them work. It turns out it is very expensive to capture large amounts of gases for an indefinite period of time. You can liquify or gasify coal at a significant cost, but it still turns out much dirtier than gasoline or natural gas.
Even with its current preferential treatment, where it does not have to pay for damage it causes and it uses much government subsidies, the coal industry is generally losing money. Most major US coal companies went through bankruptcies in the last several years. It is highly doubtful investors would want to put good money in coal plants that actually have to pay for their environmental damage.
I'm not making any claims about what environmentalists are doing. I'm making a claim about the marketing. People don't like their industries, their beliefs, or their ideas being painted as evil or immoral. There are plenty of good people out there who are involved in the coal industry, some of whom are or were coal miners.
If you want their votes and you tell them that coal is evil and should be eliminated, you're going to gain a lot of opposition. I think that, instead, environmental groups should cast it as: coal is being outcompeted in sustainability, and, when the cost of handling emissions and waste is factored in, cost. (And it's often being outcompeted in cost even without any of that.) I think that people who have an economic state in coal should instead be encouraged to demand that the coal companies apply some good ol' American ingenuity and some genuine R&D investment into making coal remain useful.
(A similar idea applies to industries like steel. Blaming foreign countries for the US steel industry's declines at various times may appeal to some voters, but a more productive message would be to blame steel industry executives for sitting on their collective arses. [0]) A message demanding that they spend money and effort to keep up might be much more effective.
I'll take your point to mean this: People who want coal jobs to come back are really just pro- blue collar job. So yes, a good wind blue collar campaign showing hard working men and women that does not harp on the 'evil' of coal, but instead 'harps' on how damn good these new jobs are.
"I would also like to see the environmental groups and the left in general stop branding coal as somehow immoral. How about instead trying to make coal compete on level ground: tax its carbon emissions, tax its particulate emissions, require real management for whatever waste it produces, and see if any investors or inventors want to keep it alive."
As "hristov" notes above, your argument is concisely self-refuting. The coal industry fights tooth and nail to prevent these things, which makes the coal industry immoral by the terms you list. "Coal" is of course a chemical compound. Burning coal at utility scale is only done in contravention of the moral framework you put forth by people who oppose that framework with everything they have.
> How about instead trying to make coal compete on level ground: tax its carbon emissions, tax its particulate emissions, require real management for whatever waste it produces, and see if any investors or inventors want to keep it alive.
They've been trying to do this at the international, national and state level for decades now. The Kyoto protocol (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyoto_Protocol) was signed in 1997. Unfortunately right wing parties in most of the anglosphere think market driven solutions are left wing conspiracy theories.
Coal IS immoral, and you don't even have to bring climate change into it. The US coal industry was built by exploiting the poor in Appalachia, from the beginning all the way until today, and then taking all the wealth out of the area and leaving us with nothing.
Things I'd like to see talked about? That the largest armed uprisings on American soil since the Civil War were the coal wars in West Virginia in the early 20th century. Coal unions fighting for better than what the coal mine companies, with the backing of local police and sometimes the US military, told them they were just lucky to have.
And that of the 900 clean-up workers at the 2008 Kingston fly ash spill, 30 are dead and 250 are dying because they were refused to gear and fired if they brought their own, because if they wore so much as a dust mask, the neighbors might suspect that maybe the largest environmental disaster in US history wasn't as non-toxic as the TVA tried to pretend it was. It will still be years until those people get a dime of compensation.
So many places in Appalachia with poisoned water, polluted air, no futures, and no prospects. Cheap energy tho amirite
This guy is right on, it's time to stop calling clean energy "clean energy". That term makes it sound like the differentiating aspects of wind and solar as compared to coal, gas and oil, is that the new stuff has lower carbon output. That's true, but it's not the point anymore. Wind and solar are so efficient, and so cheap that there's no need to market them on their environmental impact, so dump clean energy. Here are some ideas I'm just throwing out there for new terms:
"Renewable energy" is a perfect term, but I think that it has the same negative connotation for the people who have an aversion to the term "clean energy".
The rapid growth of jobs in renewable energy is a temporary excursion, mostly an artifact of current rapid expansion. At steady-state it will take fewer people to supply electricity from a renewable-heavy electricity system than a coal-heavy system. That's one reason that I am bullish on the long term price-competitiveness of renewable electricity but skeptical that there will be enough steady "green jobs" to offset jobs shed from legacy energy technologies.
For example, the old coal plant in Nucla, Colorado is going to close by the end of 2022.
the local job options could be pretty limited in far-western Montrose County once two of its major employers close their doors, eliminating what are currently 55 jobs at the plant and 28 at the mine.
...
According to the EIA, the Nucla plant generated 416,150 MWh in 2015 for an average annual power of 47.5 megawatts: http://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/browser/#/plant/527 That's an abysmal productivity per employee (or a fabulous job source, depending on your perspective): 0.86 real annualized megawatts per employee at the plant ; 0.57 megawatts per employee if you include the mining jobs.
(Since this article was published, the mine shut down. The coal plant still operates for a few more years. The MWh generated at the Nucla plant also declined sharply in 2016 and 2017.)
A well-sited utility scale solar farm like Desert Sunlight can produce an average annualized power of 147 megawatts with just 15 full time employees, for a ratio of 9.8 megawatts per plant employee.
If you amortize the labor for construction over the lifetime of a solar farm, it takes up the lion's share of labor-years associated with a given facility. It's still lower per MWh than for legacy coal plants. It's also concentrated up-front. It looks like solar produces a lot of jobs if you measure while new American solar projects are booming and new American coal projects are nowhere to be seen.
I don't intend any of these observations as a defense of coal or an attack on renewable energy. I am thrilled whenever low-emissions sources displace dirty fossils. But I keep writing comments like this on energy-and-jobs stories because few writers have thought much about the composition of the numbers. The gleeful articles about how many jobs we can create with renewable energy are at least missing some important caveats. The occasional conservative attack on how labor-inefficient renewables are, like https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2016/06/01/jobs-are..., likewise misunderstand the long term labor implications of more renewables than fossils.
> 0.57 megawatts per employee if you include the mining jobs [...] a ratio of 9.8 megawatts per plant employee [for renewable energy].
Another media take is that renewable energy will be costly for America (a specific perspective is that it's a Chinese conspiracy); this tidbit clearly shows that this perspective is false.
If America does not commit to renewable energy it will most certainly fall behind the rest of the world where energy would be significantly cheaper, if not "free" via taxation. As a generalization: local manufacturing won't be able to compete with international competition (because international competition would have lower energy costs), so there won't be anywhere else to get work. There won't be money to import fossils (due to a lack of manufacturing exports), so there won't be fossils to generate power. To make matters worse, these two outcomes are mutually-reinforcing.
We can't compete with China right now because of cheap Chinese labor, imagine how the manufacturing landscape would look with cheap Chinese energy thrown into the mix. Renewables save more blue collar jobs in the long run (but fewer energy jobs in the short-term).
In the long run, there is no way to save all the energy jobs. We need to start looking for other ways to tackle the coming energy labor market crash and, apart from UBI as a pretty flawed solution, I have nothing.
The main reason that renewable energy looks cheaper is that most countries chose, as a policy decision, to count the costs of dealing with its intermittent nature entirely against the non-renewables that have to fill in the gaps rather than the renewable generation. That's why Germany has wholesale electricity prices that regularly go negative thanks to green energy and some of the highest consumer electricity pricing on the planet - the renewables get the right to sell to the grid even when their power's not useful and the non-renewable have to pay for this, and then ultimately consumers have to pay when the non-renewables need to fill in for dips.
The comparison drawn is MW/employee which is not relative to anything: it's just how much power the plant is pushing, irrespective of whether its useful as that specific time. It's a fair oracle. I purposefully stated "long run" because none of this works until energy storage is also solved (which it mostly is) or developed (which it definitely is not).
> The rapid growth of jobs in renewable energy is a temporary excursion, mostly an artifact of current rapid expansion.
Nonetheless, the expansion may continue for decades -- long enough for someone who needs a job now to make it all the way to retirement.
And, significantly, long enough for renewables to replace less labor-efficient and generally worse generation methods throughout the power grid. By the time the new construction jobs run out, the lobby for the legacy generation methods will be gone.
Yes, I agree that renewable construction jobs will remain plentiful for some time. I have some concerns about the nomadic life required for one person to make a long term living with a solar construction job. On the other hand, not growing too anchored to one particular employer in one location may also be good in the long term. Part of the problem with retiring obsolete coal plants is that whole communities became dependent on one big local employer.
Environmentalists are the only power bloc in politics that isn't in favour of cheap energy (their priority is obviously 'clean'). The irony of this is that if it happens that clean energy is the most economic alternative, then the small number of fanatics who want to make it a moral or political issue are going to be the biggest roadblock. They'll probably still be ignored as they have been for the last couple of decades though.
That being said, talking about the number of jobs might be politically savvy but isn't actually a big picture advantage - energy production is a bit special in my view and we don't want people working on that. We want people working on ways of taking energy and transforming it into something useful. The thinking here is a bit like observing the difference between being unemployed and starving vs. unemployed with a $10 million inheritance - there are good and bad ways to be unemployed. With cheap enough energy, anything is possible.
It seems to me that environmentalists want cheap energy, they just (rightly) consider the environmental damage of traditional energy to be part of its cost, and it’s expensive enough that it’s not actually “cheap energy.”
I agree with a lot of what this guy says, but this bit rankled my nerves:
> In short, it doesn’t feel American. […] American is can-do, right-now, yes ma’am…
No dude, that is exactly the kind of polarizing attitude that you are accusing the folks on the other… "side of the fence" (or whatever you want to call that).
"American" is lots of things to lots of different people.
This is a social class issue, as much as it is a 'branding' issue. The social class that likes Subarus and Volvos, recycling, organic foods, and coffee with foam in it (aka us, the hacker news types) has chosen 'clean energy' as a sort of social purity test.
What he's saying does make sense; take it away from the bozos who brought us ... Facebook, 'Obamacare,' $4000 studio apartments next to a pile of human excrement in San Francisco, and the rest of the disgusting mess that is modern life, and it might be more popular with regular joes.
"Clean energy could feel as all-American, cutting-edge, rugged, reliable, resilient, and tough as fracking."
Feel, schmeel. Clean energy must be -thought of- as manifestly the only rational option ... one that is decades behind where it needs to be ... one that is an urgent priority.
The future of all life on Earth is at stake. We waited too long, and now it's too late for PR, too late for 'gentle easing'.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 106 ms ] threadA television ad campaign showing lots of blue and white collar workers at solar farms, wind farms, and hydro plants performing various maintenance, construction, and engineering activities might help more than the shots of wilderness and nature that seem to be designed to appeal to environmentalists more than the average joe. need a slogan and an audio signature (a la intel bong or netflix drum) and clean green power could become the engine powering America's future!
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-16/solar-bea...
I also wonder whether the talk of coal being dirty and dangerous actually boosts its appeal to some voters. At the least solar and wind need to be seen as rugged. Maybe they should also play up scale, the latest offshore wind turbines, for instance, are absolutely massive.
For example, see the attitudes around "Rollin' Coal". Practitioners cite "American freedom" and a stand against "rampant environmentalism" as reasons for coal rolling (aka "Prius repellent"). I'm not sure what argument one could make to change a coal roller's mind.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_coal
The unreliability of the emissions gear is usually what comes up when I talk to diesel folks. Rolling coal is a fun extra for them.
Just musing now, but the diesel guys today seem to say a lot of the same things the gas guys said in the 80s with their EGRs and cats and vacuum lines galore under the hood destroying their reliability. Gas got variable timing and direct injection, and is no longer so fragile. Maybe there's some room left for innovation there, maybe not.
Yes, you need to keep it clean, drag affects all things equally, and dirty anything means more drag.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_Mess_with_Texas
> In 1985 the Texas Department of Transportation asked Mike Blair and Tim McClure of GSD&M to create a slogan for an anti-littering campaign. McClure said that "bubbas in pickup trucks" who regularly littered beer cans and other items out of vehicle windows and ordinary Texans who believed that littering was a "God-given right" were targets of the advertising campaign. ... McClure recalled that "The crowd was sprinkled with 'Keep America Beautiful' and 'Keep Texas Beautiful' folks, and our audience is 18-to-24 young males." McClure added that "The 'Keep Texas Beautiful' lady said, 'Can we at least say please?' I said, 'No ma'am, you cannot use the line if you put please in front of it.'
But this article is also two years old. When it was written, coal-vs-cleantech was a big campaign issue for example.
A different rebranding angle that people are talking about now is just pure cost. Most of the new energy generation capacity added in 2018 has been renewable: https://www.forbes.com/sites/rrapier/2018/05/06/renewable-so...
This isn't because of "clean jobs" or a nationwide coordinated renewable push (there isn't one, and Trump has done his best to cut whatever marginal subsidies exist). It's because renewable is now the cheapest form of new energy. The beancounters love it. Conservative Texas is the largest windfarm state in the country.
This shouldn't be surprising -- renewables are largely manufacturing-based industries where the more we build, the better we get at building it and the cheaper it becomes. Compare that to fracking where the half-life of a fracking well is 2-4 years -- after 2-4 years, the well contains half as much oil as it did, and what's left becomes harder and more expensive to extract (compare that to a saudi oil well that has half-life measured in decades and that should tell you something about the "fracking revolution" vs "fracking boom", but I digress...)
Point is, we're now at the turning point where the economics of renewable just make sense. The rebranding as An American Thing was a good talking point two years ago (and still room for it, tbh), but costs are now the more interesting story.
off-shore triple-damage elbow-grease tidal wave sooperpower
merciless monkey wrenched czochralsi silicon titty solar panels
full frontal 24/7 double penetration doctor x' geothermal energy
strike-breaking conflict mineralized all-american circumcized powerwalls
Mach-4 Modern Times side winder electrical wind mills
National Park flooding blue-collar nine-to-five hydroelectric damnation
brutal triangle trade carbon credit master race cards
storm trooper deployed stars and stripes space shades
high-maintenance super cool transmission lines
soundtrack: https://youtu.be/qvhSaIh02dA
If the CO2 emissions could be adequately captured, the particulates scrubbed, and the fly ash turned into concrete [0], there may very well be a place for coal for hundreds of years.
[0] Fly ash appears to be a pretty good replacement for a large amount of Portland cement, and the latter also comes with quite a bit of CO2 emissions.
[1] https://www.cement.org/docs/default-source/fc_concrete_techn...
[0]https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/Coal_formation
The other ways to make a difference, besides pushing hard against the very negative and misery-causing emissions, are to innovate tech, to make clean energy experiences better for consumers, and to push tangentially related policies like EV credits, solar credits, and other policies which help non-toxic energy sources.
Actually, this is exactly what environmentalists have been trying to do. This is what the cap and trade system which has been pushed by various environmental organisations was all about. But of course it was blocked by conservatives paid by the energy industry.
There is one rare fact that both environmentalists and coal executives agree on -- if the coal industry is forced to pay for their emissions it will die. So I can confidently answer your question -- there would be no investors wanting to keep it alive.
Furthermore, the US government has spent literary billions of taxpayer money to make coal environmentally acceptable. All kinds of schemes have been tried -- carbon capture, coal liquification, coal gasification, etc. None of them work. It turns out it is very expensive to capture large amounts of gases for an indefinite period of time. You can liquify or gasify coal at a significant cost, but it still turns out much dirtier than gasoline or natural gas.
Even with its current preferential treatment, where it does not have to pay for damage it causes and it uses much government subsidies, the coal industry is generally losing money. Most major US coal companies went through bankruptcies in the last several years. It is highly doubtful investors would want to put good money in coal plants that actually have to pay for their environmental damage.
If you want their votes and you tell them that coal is evil and should be eliminated, you're going to gain a lot of opposition. I think that, instead, environmental groups should cast it as: coal is being outcompeted in sustainability, and, when the cost of handling emissions and waste is factored in, cost. (And it's often being outcompeted in cost even without any of that.) I think that people who have an economic state in coal should instead be encouraged to demand that the coal companies apply some good ol' American ingenuity and some genuine R&D investment into making coal remain useful.
(A similar idea applies to industries like steel. Blaming foreign countries for the US steel industry's declines at various times may appeal to some voters, but a more productive message would be to blame steel industry executives for sitting on their collective arses. [0]) A message demanding that they spend money and effort to keep up might be much more effective.
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-03-05/steel-...
As "hristov" notes above, your argument is concisely self-refuting. The coal industry fights tooth and nail to prevent these things, which makes the coal industry immoral by the terms you list. "Coal" is of course a chemical compound. Burning coal at utility scale is only done in contravention of the moral framework you put forth by people who oppose that framework with everything they have.
They've been trying to do this at the international, national and state level for decades now. The Kyoto protocol (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyoto_Protocol) was signed in 1997. Unfortunately right wing parties in most of the anglosphere think market driven solutions are left wing conspiracy theories.
Things I'd like to see talked about? That the largest armed uprisings on American soil since the Civil War were the coal wars in West Virginia in the early 20th century. Coal unions fighting for better than what the coal mine companies, with the backing of local police and sometimes the US military, told them they were just lucky to have.
And that of the 900 clean-up workers at the 2008 Kingston fly ash spill, 30 are dead and 250 are dying because they were refused to gear and fired if they brought their own, because if they wore so much as a dust mask, the neighbors might suspect that maybe the largest environmental disaster in US history wasn't as non-toxic as the TVA tried to pretend it was. It will still be years until those people get a dime of compensation.
So many places in Appalachia with poisoned water, polluted air, no futures, and no prospects. Cheap energy tho amirite
New Energy
Tech Energy
Cheap Energy
Durable Energy
Efficient Energy
Or "independent/freedom energy" to highlight that building up renewables pushes independence from resources provided by foreign nations.
Along those lines, how about "secure energy" since energy independence is a national security issue as well.
This should be large part of the narrative. I vote "Energy Freedom."
For example, the old coal plant in Nucla, Colorado is going to close by the end of 2022.
http://www.cortezjournal.com/article/20161001/News05/1610099...
...
the local job options could be pretty limited in far-western Montrose County once two of its major employers close their doors, eliminating what are currently 55 jobs at the plant and 28 at the mine.
...
According to the EIA, the Nucla plant generated 416,150 MWh in 2015 for an average annual power of 47.5 megawatts: http://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/browser/#/plant/527 That's an abysmal productivity per employee (or a fabulous job source, depending on your perspective): 0.86 real annualized megawatts per employee at the plant ; 0.57 megawatts per employee if you include the mining jobs.
(Since this article was published, the mine shut down. The coal plant still operates for a few more years. The MWh generated at the Nucla plant also declined sharply in 2016 and 2017.)
A well-sited utility scale solar farm like Desert Sunlight can produce an average annualized power of 147 megawatts with just 15 full time employees, for a ratio of 9.8 megawatts per plant employee.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_Sunlight_Solar_Farm
https://www.doi.gov/sites/doi.gov/files/migrated/news/pressr... ("Expected to create up to... 15 permanent jobs")
If you amortize the labor for construction over the lifetime of a solar farm, it takes up the lion's share of labor-years associated with a given facility. It's still lower per MWh than for legacy coal plants. It's also concentrated up-front. It looks like solar produces a lot of jobs if you measure while new American solar projects are booming and new American coal projects are nowhere to be seen.
I don't intend any of these observations as a defense of coal or an attack on renewable energy. I am thrilled whenever low-emissions sources displace dirty fossils. But I keep writing comments like this on energy-and-jobs stories because few writers have thought much about the composition of the numbers. The gleeful articles about how many jobs we can create with renewable energy are at least missing some important caveats. The occasional conservative attack on how labor-inefficient renewables are, like https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2016/06/01/jobs-are..., likewise misunderstand the long term labor implications of more renewables than fossils.
Another media take is that renewable energy will be costly for America (a specific perspective is that it's a Chinese conspiracy); this tidbit clearly shows that this perspective is false.
If America does not commit to renewable energy it will most certainly fall behind the rest of the world where energy would be significantly cheaper, if not "free" via taxation. As a generalization: local manufacturing won't be able to compete with international competition (because international competition would have lower energy costs), so there won't be anywhere else to get work. There won't be money to import fossils (due to a lack of manufacturing exports), so there won't be fossils to generate power. To make matters worse, these two outcomes are mutually-reinforcing.
We can't compete with China right now because of cheap Chinese labor, imagine how the manufacturing landscape would look with cheap Chinese energy thrown into the mix. Renewables save more blue collar jobs in the long run (but fewer energy jobs in the short-term).
In the long run, there is no way to save all the energy jobs. We need to start looking for other ways to tackle the coming energy labor market crash and, apart from UBI as a pretty flawed solution, I have nothing.
Nonetheless, the expansion may continue for decades -- long enough for someone who needs a job now to make it all the way to retirement.
And, significantly, long enough for renewables to replace less labor-efficient and generally worse generation methods throughout the power grid. By the time the new construction jobs run out, the lobby for the legacy generation methods will be gone.
That being said, talking about the number of jobs might be politically savvy but isn't actually a big picture advantage - energy production is a bit special in my view and we don't want people working on that. We want people working on ways of taking energy and transforming it into something useful. The thinking here is a bit like observing the difference between being unemployed and starving vs. unemployed with a $10 million inheritance - there are good and bad ways to be unemployed. With cheap enough energy, anything is possible.
> In short, it doesn’t feel American. […] American is can-do, right-now, yes ma’am…
No dude, that is exactly the kind of polarizing attitude that you are accusing the folks on the other… "side of the fence" (or whatever you want to call that).
"American" is lots of things to lots of different people.
What he's saying does make sense; take it away from the bozos who brought us ... Facebook, 'Obamacare,' $4000 studio apartments next to a pile of human excrement in San Francisco, and the rest of the disgusting mess that is modern life, and it might be more popular with regular joes.
Feel, schmeel. Clean energy must be -thought of- as manifestly the only rational option ... one that is decades behind where it needs to be ... one that is an urgent priority.
The future of all life on Earth is at stake. We waited too long, and now it's too late for PR, too late for 'gentle easing'.