Inside me there are two wolves[0]; the optimistic one says this is fantastic and applauds the effort, the cynical one thinks this was going to happen on this time scale anyway and is therefore a waste of money.
No. The eradication of pollution sources, even coal, is not at all inevitable. Remember that there's an active and large pro-pollution element in US politics right now. it Any money spent in a positive direction is useful to help avoid or win fights to push things in the wrong direction.
> an active and large pro-pollution element in US politics right now
No, there is not. Rather there is a Democratic strawman that they enjoy attacking.
What there is, is an element that doesn't want energy disruptions, and isn't willing to compromise on that. Look at this table: https://www.fool.com/research/renewable-energy-by-state/ and notice how with the exception of California, all the states with high renewable percentages are conservative leaning.
who knows maybe in Bloombergs old age he's trying to grow a soul. He's realizing that he can't take it with him and he's been a shit steward while he's been on earth, maybe he's trying o to correct the error of his ways...or he's afraid he's going to hell.
My cynical version is asking what Bloomberg is getting out of it. Is he heavily invested and 500M is just a good way to increase the electicity costs and generate better return?
Does Bloomberg also have a plan to replace them with something else that will serve as reliable base load? Otherwise this is just a plan to turn the US into South Africa with perpetual brown outs.
> "The financing is intended to support research, including studies and analysis to deliver accurate data to partnering organizations and officials for better decision-making. It will also fund local policy and advocacy, along with litigation brought against power companies."
The $500M is NOT an investment, it is a media campaign.
There's absolutely nothing the US can do to stop that.
You could drop US emissions to zero tomorrow and it wouldn't stop it. China's extreme emissions growth is guaranteeing this only ends one way.
And that's just one entity.
Next is India. And then after that is Africa. Those two will add 1.5 billion people (another China) over the next 50 years and they will want to emit and consume like everybody else. India will end up with emissions growth that looks a lot like China, with hundreds of millions more people than what China has today.
If you believe in the existing projections on global climate change and what it will do, the end is already settled.
The US reducing its emissions by eg 1/4 or 1/3 is entirely meaningless against the increases elsewhere. It's not like we could just go hyper green and be spared, it doesn't work that way. It's global climate change.
No, the US is responsible for 15% of global CO2 emissions. China emit around twice as much (with around 4x the population), but their emissions aren't growing over the last 10 years. In fact, they have increased their energy consumption by a lot in that decade (commensurate with becoming much richer), partly with renewables and partly by replacing bad uses of fossil fuels with better ones. Neither is their population growing. India and Africa together emit less than the US for around 6x the pop. They have a lot of population growth ahead of them, and a fair amount of getting wealthier, before they start to eat up a 1/4 drop in US emissions.
A bit ridiculous to claim that global warming is caused by the dirt poor and the not yet born 'wanting to consume like Americans' when it's obvious that at least half of Americans are determined to continue consuming like Americans whatever the cost.
Your argument basically seems to boil down to "the most polluting country can't reduce use of its most polluting energy source because other countries exist and emit anything at all".
>Your argument basically seems to boil down to "the most polluting country can't reduce use of its most polluting energy source because other countries exist and emit anything at all".
It's more like your argument forgot to account for fossil fuel demand elasticity and the reason why the developing world emits less CO2 per capita. It's not because they are enlightened minimalists who care more. It's because they are being outbid by the developed world.
For every amount the developed world cuts fossil fuel usage, it makes it cheaper for everyone else to buy. Price goes down, demand goes up. Usage doesn't go down, it shifts. This is a self defeating strategy. Your theory of global emissions reduction only works if no one changes their behavior in response to supply/demand changes.
Yes, I'm sure that demand for West Virginia's coal is perfectly elastic between US power plants also located in the Midwest and ones in India and Africa that haven't been built yet.
Fossil fuels are priced on a global futures markets. Did you think Canadian oil producers exist in a vacuum where Qatari production, or Indian demand, has no effect on them? Whether Canadian oil actually makes it to India doesn't matter.
If you know more than someone else, that's great, but in that case please share some of what you know—without putdowns or snark—so the rest of us can learn:
You don't need specific plants that act as perfectly reliable base load. If a bunch of auxiliary fossil fuel plants come online for 10 days per year, that's almost as good as never using them.
There's a maintenance cost, of course, but as far as carbon goals it's very doable.
The economics of that don’t even come within the same universe as working out. Those plants wouldn’t just be losing money, they’d be losing unfathomably huge amounts of money.
I mean y'all can downvote all you like but that doesn't change the financials of shuttering a powerplant. How tf you gonna retain the skilled employees required to run the damn thing when they're furloughed 300 days out of the year?
I dunno, seems pretty wild to me. If the thing isn't generating electricity you're sitting there with a huge labor bill and nothing to show for it. That this sort of thing might make sense from a purely technical perspective seems reasonable to me but I don't see how you'd fund it.
If you're worried strictly about profits, and not a strong desire to avoid CO2 emissions, we can imagine a carbon tax. $100 per ton would cost a coal plant 10¢/kWh on top of operating costs. So if a carbon-free source gets even close for operating costs, then that's a lot of money to fund a backup plant and still come out ahead.
And this doesn't really require a tax. We could imagine an electrical company pricing out their aversion to carbon in cents per kWh out of their own volition or because of customer demand.
That's a very narrow view. Either don't make the plants independently owned, or pay the plants for keeping the capacity available, or pay them a huge markup for those 10 days. Two and a half good solutions!
You're being nakedly dishonest by drawing a false equivalence between this and the entirely different category of problems that SA power infrastructure is facing.
> Does Bloomberg also have a plan to replace them with something else that will serve as reliable base load? Otherwise this is just a plan to turn the US into South Africa with perpetual brown outs.
He doesn't need one. He's a retired billionaire, whose retirement hobby is social engineering. Brown outs aren't his concern, as I'm sure his home will have adequate back-up power.
How about the jobs? I would like reducing coal mining to be high on the priority list but wouldn't want a lone billionaire deciding to shut down a bunch of jobs in my area.
Those jobs are going away anyway. There's less market for coal and automation means fewer miners are needed, so even in the absence of any push to transition to green energy almost all coal miners are going to lose their jobs.
There's roughly 50,000 coal mining jobs in the US[1]. Saving those is not worth setting the world on fire. I would happily support giving every single one of them an immediate, life-time, full-wage pension, if it means ending coal power plants tomorrow. It would pay for itself immediately.
Please show me the total emissions of US coal, stacked up against global emissions, and then China's emissions and their emissions growth (ideally with a break-out on their coal emissions expansion, which is ongoing).
China added a hundred new coal plants in 2022 alone. That's half as many coal plants in the US, added in just a single year. And they're still going. Those are new plants, they no doubt plan to operate them for decades.
What do you think about China adding 500 new coal plants over the next ten years?
US coal is not going to make a difference whether it continues or not.
I don't have any control over China's policies. I do have a tiny bit of control over the US's policies, so that's what I concern myself with. I have no choice but to that trust there will be people like me in their respective regions who will do the same in their countries. As you say, it's a global problem, everyone knows that everyone needs to get on board to fix this. Regardless of what other countries do, the US must do its part to solve the problem, or the problem won't be solved. Losing 50k coal jobs is not sufficient reason to prevent the US from doing its part.
You're absolutely right that it's a super big and super hard problem. But we can't just throw our hands up. Even if you're not on board with helping, I beg you to please not stand in the way (or vote for those who stand in the way) of those of us who care about fixing this problem.
Edit: Oh, failed to address this:
> US coal is not going to make a difference whether it continues or not.
It absolutely will! The US is responsible for about 15% of worldwide carbon emissions[1]. Of that, about 25%[2] is from electricity generation. Of that, about 80% comes from coal and natural gas. 15 * .25 * .80 = about 1.8% of global emissions comes from US coal & natural gas power plants alone. Two percent of global emissions is quite a huge amount! It'd be one nice, big step forward on the long, long (long) road to fixing this problem. You gotta do something, or else you're doing nothing, and coal plants are a great target to aim at.
Your figure includes natural gas. That makes a big chunk of power generation [1], big enough that you would probably want to address an alternative source like nuclear power.
Turns out China emits around half the CO2 per capita that the US does, and the total hasn't grown in the last decade.
The total amount of power generated from coal in China also hasn't grown in more than 10 years. And the coal they do have has become cleaner, so the carbon emissions just due to that have gone down slightly.
'But China's growth is cancelling out all our potential cuts' was a technically true, but still venal and dangerously misguided excuse 15 years (and 0.25C) ago when it was first invented. Now it isn't even technically true.
People here extensively drank the kool-aid, and they don't even have the beginning of the required understanding of the economics and the physics of grid scale electricity production and distribution.
Maybe they will understand when they pay the same for energy as in Germany.
Concentrating Solar-Thermal Power (CSP) is rapidly getting cheaper: from 9.8¢/kWh (2018) to 5.0¢/kWh (2030) [1]. With 14 hours of storage, this can take care of baseload.
As far as I understand, most of the Midwest is actually pretty conducive to solar generation.
As a cherry picked example, Minneapolis has roughly 200 more annual sunshine hours than Houston.
Obviously somewhere like Phoenix blows those numbers out of the water, but solar is still very economical in the Midwest. I see new utility scale solar farms popping up here all the time.
> Minneapolis has roughly 200 more annual sunshine hours than Houston.
That's very interesting because what I recall from about 15 years ago is that Minneapolis was slightly behind Houston in that regard. I wonder if it's just variation within the error band or it's been impacted by climate change?
Regardless, here in rural MN I see a lot of new barns/sheds going up with solar panels on the roof whereas 15 years ago they would either have used generators or paid to have AC power run all the way out there.
Days in Minneapolis are indeed longer in the summer time, but far shorter in the winter time. Electric heat is quite challenging in the winter, when a plant such as this would be at a fraction of its output.
The link in the parent post contains a map that would indicate most suitable location by far for such an installation would be in the South West.
However, without an installation with a proven track record, this seems kind of like pie in the sky thinking.
So roughly half the cost 12 years later? Meanwhile the last 10 years of PV solar have seen the price drop to about 1/4 of what they were. And concentrated solar was already more expensive than PV solar.
But, I hear you say, what about the cost of storage? Certainly the concentrated solar can get wins by generating steam using the molten sodium for hours after the sun goes down. Over the last 10 years chemical batteries have dropped to about 1/10 of their old price and the trendline still points downwards. Battery production is seriously ramping up as EVs push demand and grid storage becomes a huge issue.
Concentrated Solar is still a day late and a dollar short.
> This report finds 99 percent of the existing U.S. coal fleet is more expensive to run compared to replacement by new solar or wind. Replacing coal plants with local wind and solar would also save enough to finance nearly 150 gigawatts of four-hour battery storage, over 60 percent of the coal fleet’s capacity, and generate $589 billion in new investment across the U.S. Our report provides policy recommendations to facilitate a just transition through the Coal Cost Crossover.
(obligatory "base load is a myth", you overbuild renewables in order to make up for firm generation shortfall, you'll see some fossil gas generation uptick until firm renewables and more batteries drive out fossil gas generation, etc)
NREL disagrees, and states that battery storage is sufficient to hit 80% renewables penetration. Seasonal storage remains to be solved for.
> The main scenarios modelled show how very low-carbon and high renewable energy grids can be enabled, in the range of 80% by 2050. However, to get to 100% decarbonisation scenarios, it’s very likely variable renewable energy (VRE) paired with diurnal storage will not be enough. Seasonal storage — with durations of days, or even weeks or months — from technologies like hydrogen could help push the grid to fully carbon-free, especially if they can become cost-competitive.
You could also just burn fossil gas for that last bit if direct air carbon capture gets cheap enough to use the atmosphere as the battery, pulling the carbon from combustion back underground in stable state when clean energy is available and cheap (and is why Climeworks' Orca installation runs in Iceland on clean geothermal power). Enough sunlight falls on the Earth every 2 minutes to power humanity for a year, so we can kick the can on the last, hardest part until we get there.
I mean $500M is something but not that much when it comes to shutting down all coal plants and replacing it with renewable energy. Thats about 500-650 MW of production -- half the size of a standard Nuclear facility (1GW).
It certainly helps though. And I bet that he's getting a pretty sweet tax break ;)
I mean, look at what they are spending it on: Apparently not directly on power plants if i follow the article linked.
It indicates to me that we talk about an investment with multiplication possibility:
"The financing is intended to support research, including studies and analysis to deliver accurate data to partnering organizations and officials for better decision-making. It will also fund local policy and advocacy, along with litigation brought against power companies."
Which will lead to even more and faster and better green energy through more investment and more focus and more acceptance and therefore more investment and more research and further cheaper prices for everyone.
I will buy this year a little bit of PV too for the first time.
>Bloomberg has successfully helped shut down about 70% of all coal plants in the U.S.
I find that hard to believe. Did he help shut down 70% of coal plants or did he help shut down 70% of the coal plants that were shut down? If the former, where did the replacement energy come from?
Coal power generation reached its peak in the US in 2007 at 2,016 terawatt hours. As of 2022 coal has declined to 829 TWh (41% of peak). The decline in generated electricity is less than 70% because in most cases small coal plants are less economical than large coal plants, so small ones shut down first.
The coal output lost since 2007 has been replaced by gas (+792 TWh) and renewables (+560 TWh). You can see all the numbers by hovering over the chart in this report:
No way is he responsible for shutting down 70% of the coal plants -- thats a bunch of PR BS. What shutdown coal is the economics became untenable. No way am I giving Bloomberg a shred of that benefit. That he would claim that is concerning.
It doesn't sound like a lot of money to me. I mean for an individual yes, but how many wind turbines would $500M buy, total installed cost? Might be better spent on research where it could have some leveragable impact, rather than just spent on today's technology.
It’s for buying political capital, which is as important as the underlying tech. Look at how the US gave away its solar industry to China from of lack of political will.
This is for research, advocacy, and lobbying to get them shut and have the localities favor green energy. They are not building new energy sources, just pushing along and speeding up the transition.
Why not spend the money building better power plants? Wouldn't that be a better way to "push" decision makers into newer technologies? According to their own success stories, most of the agencies that "stopped" using coal were going to anyways. I'm not at all clear on how this money was used and why the amount spent was correct in any way.
It really looks like more "green washing" purely to the benefit of the "Bloomberg" brand.
The development of better power technologies is ~necessary, but not sufficient, to eliminate coal (and other carbon-emitting energy sources). There are all sorts of friction effects which can delay a migration to clean power even when the economics are favorable, so direct efforts to push the decision forward are an important piece of the puzzle.
> The development of better power technologies is ~necessary, but not sufficient, to eliminate coal
Why? Are there not other plant technologies already in existence that can pick up the base load and produce less pollution?
> There are all sorts of friction effects which can delay a migration to clean power
Okay, so what are those? This article and it's backing material don't go into that at all. What did this money accomplish that would not have happened on it's own?
> so direct efforts to push the decision forward are an important piece of the puzzle.
As I stated, the backing material makes it clear these decisions were happening anyways. So, again, what is this money actually doing?
I get that there are issues, but I'm concerned that we're actually addressing them and not just green washing. Do you want to address that specific point?
> It really looks like more "green washing" purely to the benefit of the "Bloomberg" brand.
I have no doubt that Bloomberg is doing this, at least in part, to get credit for giving $500m away to help decarbonize the economy. And yet if that was his goal he could have accomplished this in many ways. You seem to be going further and accusing him of giving $500m away in a manner that’s explicitly designed to be ineffective. That doesn’t make a ton of sense to me.
I wouldn't go so far as to say "explicitly designed", but he is in fact spending the money in a way that's ineffective. His motivations I don't know. But the results can be seen - this is a waste of money.
I'm sure he's getting something out of it. Perhaps it's really more lobbying for Bloomberg. Perhaps it's tax related. Perhaps it's just a "pledge," which is non-binding.
Like a deduction? I don't know why people talk about tax deductions so weirdly. If you give away a dollar, and through deductions avoid paying 25 cents of tax on the dollar, you still gave away that money. It's not some clever scheme to benefit you. At most you get to brag about a moderately higher number.
I don't know all the tax loopholes billionaires use, I'm not an accountant. He's probably not giving $500M in cash or all cash, it could be old equipment valued higher, buildings, etc. If I donated an old beat up Chevy pickup, I could say it was worth $10,000 when it was really worth $200 in scrap, maybe. Do that with a fleet of 100 trucks and that's a million right there. You just pay an expert to value it higher if you need to, but you probably don't even need to do that. The IRS isn't in the business of valuing things, and it's hard to prove what the value of something is at any given time. He could be donating it to another company he owns, who knows. If there's one thing I know, billionaires don't pay much tax. You know how the art trick works for deductions?
It is 100% greenwashing. He's doing nothing useful, he's just suing companies.
If he actually wanted to help he would simply invest new additional power installation, and sue governments that have zoning that prevents these installations.
But he doesn't want to help, he wants to be seen as helping.
> Why not spend the money building better power plants?
This is equivalent to the “build it and customers will come” fallacy of startups. You still have to convince humans that it’s all worth it.
The US could have had the nuclear industry of France (~70% of its electricity generation) if we had only gotten everyone to agree in the 80s. At the end of the day, you need money and marketing to convince people.
> The financing is intended to support research, including studies and analysis to deliver accurate data to partnering organizations and officials for better decision-making.
The cause itself notwithstanding, that's some impressive spin doctoring.
There are 2 main things blocking this: Zoning issues. A lot of states have restrictive zoning that makes energy installation hard[0]. And money. (Although he Inflation Reduction Act will help[1], at least for windmills.)
Since the 2nd problem is money, Bloomberg could have helped here - all he needed to do was invest all this money into buying and installing windmills. But he didn't.
Warnings are worthless, activism is worthless, political posturing is worthless.
The only thing that actually matters is private investment (and government can help make that attractive). Provide tax credits or loan guarantees for new energy investments (the bipartisan Inflation Reduction Act is a good step).
My advice for Mr. Bloomberg? Take this money and start a public investment company, anyone can join him and invest, and he takes every bit of the money and starts installing windmills and solar. Use the proceeds to install even more.
If he put out some long term contracts for windmills parts he could dramatically boost manufacturing[1].
This is a nice little example of a funny American tendency I've observed - if someone from the Wrong Team is associated with something you agree with, the immediate assumption is that there's some way in which this is secretly bad. In this case, u/supportengineer is in fact implying that Bloomberg spent $500m to keep coal plants _open_. A laughable notion to anyone familiar with Bloomberg outside of his 2020 run, but this what happens when your brain perceives the world in Red and Blue.
> According to a press release from Bloomberg Philanthropies, this push to shut down coal-fired power plants will push officials to invest in renewable energy and clean jobs.
On one hand, it's better if we get rid of coal than if we don't, and we should do it now.
On the other hand, people who work at coal plants and lose their jobs will not turn around and become solar panel installers or wind turbine maintenance technicians. The most likely outcome is life will get worse for them. We've seen the consequences of this already from the manufacturing sector, and it's not pretty. Drugs, poverty, violence, depression.
I'm not saying we should not close down coal plants, I'm just saying there will be consequences and "they'll all work for clean tech, and live happily ever after" is not a responsible plan.
> people who work at coal plants and lose their jobs will not turn around and become solar panel installers
They could. They won’t, because of loss aversion and inertia. But a smart community could tell Bloomberg they’ll close their plant if they get a subsidy for a battery plant or a very large concentrated solar power plant.
It’s a prisoner’s dilemma. And I don’t know if there’s a solution for the mines. But the tragedy is that the populations surrounded by coal aren’t selecting for long-term decision makers.
Moreover, this is not a huge group of people we're talking about here. The entire US coal industry employs about 55k people, from top to bottom. It's not that big.
He could directly pay each one about $9,000 for getting a new job. This probably doesn't sound like much money, but a lot of these coal jobs are in extremely poor areas of the US. It's a life-changing amount of money for many of them.
Of course the real problem is that most renewables are too efficient. They don't need that many people. Once the wind turbine, solar panels, or batteries are installed they don't need someone out there every day working on them. Not the way that coal miners have to keep digging coal. It's the kind of job that puts itself out of business over time.
There is tons of private capital ready to finance new plants. If coal communities grant permits, the panels will be laid.
Also, I’m suggesting a plan an enterprising community could launch to put themselves at the front of the line. Hell, they could probably sell carbon credits against the phase-out.
Georgia Power builds utility-scale solar plants smaller than that[1]. 139 MW in the $200m price range (in 2017) certainly counts.
Add to that in order to build a $200m plant does not require $200m of liquid cash any more than buying a $500k house requires $500k of liquid cash.
$500m can put a significant amount of utility-scale solar online (although this effort does not appear to be geared to directly instantiate new power generation).
If the money went towards utility scale solar it would install about 666MW of production at the current average rate of $0.75/W installed. This is not much considering that currently coal plants generate about 200,000MW of power in the US. Obviously direct investment on this level will not be enough to achieve the goal of total Coal shutdown.
It's also worth noting that many coal plant "shutdowns" are actually just conversions to natural gas, which from a carbon perspective is more of a sidestep. Better for the environment, but far less so than offsetting the production with renewables.
I used to live in WV and can attest that coal mining jobs have been on the decline for some time. The reason is because the equipment is bigger, better and they can mine more effectively resulting in needing way less workers. You can skip to the conclusion in the linked article [1] which states:
> What happened to coal jobs is even simpler. It is the same thing that happened throughout much of the country — productivity gains led to fewer workers needed to produce the same output.
Sure some people will re-train and join a new industry, but we still need heavy equipment operators for other construction sites. There is potential that a big mining site for lithium could open up [2], then we would need miners yet again. There will unfortunately be those who don't want to move or retrain that will instead resort to just doing drugs.
Personally I think we should welcome phasing out coal and, as policy, offer help to those who's jobs were displaced to prevent creation of meth towns.
The answer to this is to stop regarding humans as worthless the instant they lose their jobs. This is the other side of the coin of venerating "hard-working Americans" -- everyone who's currently down on their luck is the opposite: worthless, lazy, stupid, entitled. Those same people "asking for government handouts" were "hard working Americans" just recently, up until forces beyond their control caused their workplace to shut down.
The economy is receiving enormous benefits from increased automation and AI and will only continue to do so super-linearly (if not exponentially) for the foreseeable future. We get to decide whether those benefits should go entirely to the people who already own everything, or whether some fraction of those benefits should go to everyone. If we can finally recognize that hundred-billionaires exist not by being a million times smarter and more productive than everyone else, but by riding the waves of a heavily interconnected and increasingly automated economy, maybe we'll finally accept heavy taxes on the beneficiaries of such automation that can be distributed as basic income.
So that's the answer, or at least a huge step in the right direction: basic income. For everyone.
Meanwhile, let's still shut down coal plants, shall we?
The fact is that they will lose their jobs, sooner or later, that is going to happen. So do you start to think about it now and figure something out, or act like all the politicians who campaign on "protecting coal mining jobs" while those mining companies go out of business themselves (because, well, market) even without these forces.
He is the company, it's his corporation. He's the founder, owner, and CEO. It's correct to associate anything he does with his company, while in law they're not the same entity, in truth, they can be treated as such.
But if the money is coming from the company accounts vs his own personal accounts makes a huge difference. What an individual does with their money is up to them as they decide. What a CEO does with the money of a company is very much not theirs alone to make. The board might not like it. Other banking rules come into play. Employees not getting a raise might have something to say.
How you can even try to conflate the two as being the same is just short sighted.
Do you honestly believe that the money used to operate the company comes out of his personal bank accounts? Are you just this unaware of how things work, or are you being a troll?
That’s not what that person said though. Bloomberg, the company, is an asset of Bloomberg the man, a tool he uses to accomplish… whatever he is up to. It’s a legal fiction under his direct control, money in the bank.
If he decides he'll need 500 million more for his personal goals he does a dividend amounting to a reduction of 568 million in Blomberg's money on hand, presto!
Huge difference there because it spent some time in his account, if you are his accountant or if you are Bank of America, but for the rest of us the distinction is largely a waste of time.
The first line of TFA makes it clear, that he, Michael Bloomberg, is personally doing this.
> "Billionaire, philanthropist, and former NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced this week that he will invest $500 million into his campaign to shut down coal plants and halve gas use by 2030."
"The financing is intended to support research, including studies and analysis to deliver accurate data to partnering organizations and officials for better decision-making. It will also fund local policy and advocacy, along with litigation brought against power companies."
So it's not actually going to help replace all that energy with carbon free energy from nuclear &c?
Who is going to pay to replace all those coal plants? I expect that will cost orders of magnitudes more.
I think you're right about renewables. You at least need fossil fuel as a backup or during surges, low wind, cloudy conditions and whatnot. I think nuclear is the only thing that can completely replace fossil unless someone comes up with a better way to store electricity.
All this just highlights the fact that none of this is going to work out for us. We halt climate change: economic collapse. We don't halt climate change: economic collapse.
Forget climate change, natural resources are already stretched to the point where the cost of living is sky-rocketing. We were distracted by the pandemic...it is/was not the main problem. Billions of people trying to live the industrial life is the problem. Natural resources and land are the bottleneck.
Overnight, the price of automobiles increased by 30%. Healthcare, housing, and energy are the root cause right now (been soaring for decades). By the time you figure those out you won't have enough bauxite or some shit.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 409 ms ] threadWhich is right?
[0] well, I am a furry :P
No, there is not. Rather there is a Democratic strawman that they enjoy attacking.
What there is, is an element that doesn't want energy disruptions, and isn't willing to compromise on that. Look at this table: https://www.fool.com/research/renewable-energy-by-state/ and notice how with the exception of California, all the states with high renewable percentages are conservative leaning.
> "The financing is intended to support research, including studies and analysis to deliver accurate data to partnering organizations and officials for better decision-making. It will also fund local policy and advocacy, along with litigation brought against power companies."
The $500M is NOT an investment, it is a media campaign.
You could drop US emissions to zero tomorrow and it wouldn't stop it. China's extreme emissions growth is guaranteeing this only ends one way.
And that's just one entity.
Next is India. And then after that is Africa. Those two will add 1.5 billion people (another China) over the next 50 years and they will want to emit and consume like everybody else. India will end up with emissions growth that looks a lot like China, with hundreds of millions more people than what China has today.
If you believe in the existing projections on global climate change and what it will do, the end is already settled.
The US reducing its emissions by eg 1/4 or 1/3 is entirely meaningless against the increases elsewhere. It's not like we could just go hyper green and be spared, it doesn't work that way. It's global climate change.
A bit ridiculous to claim that global warming is caused by the dirt poor and the not yet born 'wanting to consume like Americans' when it's obvious that at least half of Americans are determined to continue consuming like Americans whatever the cost.
Your argument basically seems to boil down to "the most polluting country can't reduce use of its most polluting energy source because other countries exist and emit anything at all".
It's more like your argument forgot to account for fossil fuel demand elasticity and the reason why the developing world emits less CO2 per capita. It's not because they are enlightened minimalists who care more. It's because they are being outbid by the developed world.
For every amount the developed world cuts fossil fuel usage, it makes it cheaper for everyone else to buy. Price goes down, demand goes up. Usage doesn't go down, it shifts. This is a self defeating strategy. Your theory of global emissions reduction only works if no one changes their behavior in response to supply/demand changes.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If you know more than someone else, that's great, but in that case please share some of what you know—without putdowns or snark—so the rest of us can learn:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
There's a maintenance cost, of course, but as far as carbon goals it's very doable.
Maintenance can be spread over the entire year, and you can use designs that don't need a big workforce just to run.
Peaker plants already exist, this isn't a crazy new realm in the operational sense.
And this doesn't really require a tax. We could imagine an electrical company pricing out their aversion to carbon in cents per kWh out of their own volition or because of customer demand.
Natural gas does this fine. Perfect is the enemy of the good.
He doesn't need one. He's a retired billionaire, whose retirement hobby is social engineering. Brown outs aren't his concern, as I'm sure his home will have adequate back-up power.
[1] https://www.ibisworld.com/industry-statistics/employment/coa...
Please show me the total emissions of US coal, stacked up against global emissions, and then China's emissions and their emissions growth (ideally with a break-out on their coal emissions expansion, which is ongoing).
China added a hundred new coal plants in 2022 alone. That's half as many coal plants in the US, added in just a single year. And they're still going. Those are new plants, they no doubt plan to operate them for decades.
What do you think about China adding 500 new coal plants over the next ten years?
US coal is not going to make a difference whether it continues or not.
You're absolutely right that it's a super big and super hard problem. But we can't just throw our hands up. Even if you're not on board with helping, I beg you to please not stand in the way (or vote for those who stand in the way) of those of us who care about fixing this problem.
Edit: Oh, failed to address this:
> US coal is not going to make a difference whether it continues or not.
It absolutely will! The US is responsible for about 15% of worldwide carbon emissions[1]. Of that, about 25%[2] is from electricity generation. Of that, about 80% comes from coal and natural gas. 15 * .25 * .80 = about 1.8% of global emissions comes from US coal & natural gas power plants alone. Two percent of global emissions is quite a huge amount! It'd be one nice, big step forward on the long, long (long) road to fixing this problem. You gotta do something, or else you're doing nothing, and coal plants are a great target to aim at.
[1] https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emiss...
[2] https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...
1: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-...
sure, here you are: https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions#co2-emissions-by-re....
Turns out China emits around half the CO2 per capita that the US does, and the total hasn't grown in the last decade.
The total amount of power generated from coal in China also hasn't grown in more than 10 years. And the coal they do have has become cleaner, so the carbon emissions just due to that have gone down slightly.
'But China's growth is cancelling out all our potential cuts' was a technically true, but still venal and dangerously misguided excuse 15 years (and 0.25C) ago when it was first invented. Now it isn't even technically true.
[1]https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/articles/2030-solar-cost-t... From Endnotes: All costs quoted here exclude benefits from federal or state tax incentives, such as the Investment Tax Credit.
As a cherry picked example, Minneapolis has roughly 200 more annual sunshine hours than Houston.
Obviously somewhere like Phoenix blows those numbers out of the water, but solar is still very economical in the Midwest. I see new utility scale solar farms popping up here all the time.
That's very interesting because what I recall from about 15 years ago is that Minneapolis was slightly behind Houston in that regard. I wonder if it's just variation within the error band or it's been impacted by climate change?
Regardless, here in rural MN I see a lot of new barns/sheds going up with solar panels on the roof whereas 15 years ago they would either have used generators or paid to have AC power run all the way out there.
The link in the parent post contains a map that would indicate most suitable location by far for such an installation would be in the South West.
However, without an installation with a proven track record, this seems kind of like pie in the sky thinking.
But, I hear you say, what about the cost of storage? Certainly the concentrated solar can get wins by generating steam using the molten sodium for hours after the sun goes down. Over the last 10 years chemical batteries have dropped to about 1/10 of their old price and the trendline still points downwards. Battery production is seriously ramping up as EVs push demand and grid storage becomes a huge issue.
Concentrated Solar is still a day late and a dollar short.
https://archive.ph/BBmOP | https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jan/30/us-coal-more...
https://www.gem.wiki/Dry_Fork_Station
https://web.archive.org/web/20230921183659/https://energyinn...
> This report finds 99 percent of the existing U.S. coal fleet is more expensive to run compared to replacement by new solar or wind. Replacing coal plants with local wind and solar would also save enough to finance nearly 150 gigawatts of four-hour battery storage, over 60 percent of the coal fleet’s capacity, and generate $589 billion in new investment across the U.S. Our report provides policy recommendations to facilitate a just transition through the Coal Cost Crossover.
(obligatory "base load is a myth", you overbuild renewables in order to make up for firm generation shortfall, you'll see some fossil gas generation uptick until firm renewables and more batteries drive out fossil gas generation, etc)
> The main scenarios modelled show how very low-carbon and high renewable energy grids can be enabled, in the range of 80% by 2050. However, to get to 100% decarbonisation scenarios, it’s very likely variable renewable energy (VRE) paired with diurnal storage will not be enough. Seasonal storage — with durations of days, or even weeks or months — from technologies like hydrogen could help push the grid to fully carbon-free, especially if they can become cost-competitive.
You could also just burn fossil gas for that last bit if direct air carbon capture gets cheap enough to use the atmosphere as the battery, pulling the carbon from combustion back underground in stable state when clean energy is available and cheap (and is why Climeworks' Orca installation runs in Iceland on clean geothermal power). Enough sunlight falls on the Earth every 2 minutes to power humanity for a year, so we can kick the can on the last, hardest part until we get there.
https://www.energy-storage.news/nrel-rapid-growth-of-energy-...
https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy22osti/81779.pdf
(TLDR We can safely kill coal today with limited impact)
It certainly helps though. And I bet that he's getting a pretty sweet tax break ;)
It indicates to me that we talk about an investment with multiplication possibility:
"The financing is intended to support research, including studies and analysis to deliver accurate data to partnering organizations and officials for better decision-making. It will also fund local policy and advocacy, along with litigation brought against power companies."
Which will lead to even more and faster and better green energy through more investment and more focus and more acceptance and therefore more investment and more research and further cheaper prices for everyone.
I will buy this year a little bit of PV too for the first time.
> Bloomberg has successfully helped shut down about 70% of all coal plants in the U.S.
He can fly around in a coal powered jet for all I care, he has done more to improve emissions than maybe anyone alive?
I find that hard to believe. Did he help shut down 70% of coal plants or did he help shut down 70% of the coal plants that were shut down? If the former, where did the replacement energy come from?
The coal output lost since 2007 has been replaced by gas (+792 TWh) and renewables (+560 TWh). You can see all the numbers by hovering over the chart in this report:
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-...
This is for research, advocacy, and lobbying to get them shut and have the localities favor green energy. They are not building new energy sources, just pushing along and speeding up the transition.
In that light, this is a ton of money.
It really looks like more "green washing" purely to the benefit of the "Bloomberg" brand.
Why? Are there not other plant technologies already in existence that can pick up the base load and produce less pollution?
> There are all sorts of friction effects which can delay a migration to clean power
Okay, so what are those? This article and it's backing material don't go into that at all. What did this money accomplish that would not have happened on it's own?
> so direct efforts to push the decision forward are an important piece of the puzzle.
As I stated, the backing material makes it clear these decisions were happening anyways. So, again, what is this money actually doing?
I get that there are issues, but I'm concerned that we're actually addressing them and not just green washing. Do you want to address that specific point?
Loss and risk aversion in the communities where the plant’s workers live, inertia and stupidity.
> the backing material makes it clear these decisions were happening anyway
I’m in Wyoming. There is emotional resonance to saving coal jobs here that transcends the data.
I have no doubt that Bloomberg is doing this, at least in part, to get credit for giving $500m away to help decarbonize the economy. And yet if that was his goal he could have accomplished this in many ways. You seem to be going further and accusing him of giving $500m away in a manner that’s explicitly designed to be ineffective. That doesn’t make a ton of sense to me.
Like a deduction? I don't know why people talk about tax deductions so weirdly. If you give away a dollar, and through deductions avoid paying 25 cents of tax on the dollar, you still gave away that money. It's not some clever scheme to benefit you. At most you get to brag about a moderately higher number.
If you meant something else, I'm very curious.
If he actually wanted to help he would simply invest new additional power installation, and sue governments that have zoning that prevents these installations.
But he doesn't want to help, he wants to be seen as helping.
This is equivalent to the “build it and customers will come” fallacy of startups. You still have to convince humans that it’s all worth it.
The US could have had the nuclear industry of France (~70% of its electricity generation) if we had only gotten everyone to agree in the 80s. At the end of the day, you need money and marketing to convince people.
The cause itself notwithstanding, that's some impressive spin doctoring.
If the data this effort produces is grounded in decent research, it's a net positive for everyone.
Is anyone suggesting this as a policy direction?
These are all popular policies.
The only good policy is build new energy sources cheaper than oil/gas/coal and let the world switch naturally and without drama.
Since the 2nd problem is money, Bloomberg could have helped here - all he needed to do was invest all this money into buying and installing windmills. But he didn't.
[0]: https://www.pnnl.gov/sites/default/files/media/file/Restrict...
[1]: https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/clean-energy-manufactur...
The only thing that actually matters is private investment (and government can help make that attractive). Provide tax credits or loan guarantees for new energy investments (the bipartisan Inflation Reduction Act is a good step).
My advice for Mr. Bloomberg? Take this money and start a public investment company, anyone can join him and invest, and he takes every bit of the money and starts installing windmills and solar. Use the proceeds to install even more.
If he put out some long term contracts for windmills parts he could dramatically boost manufacturing[1].
[1]: https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/clean-energy-manufactur...
If I just hear some billionaire is spending tons of money on something like this, I need more information.
Not that it makes it a good comment, since the answer is right there in the article. But the question isn't automatically stupid tribalism.
On one hand, it's better if we get rid of coal than if we don't, and we should do it now.
On the other hand, people who work at coal plants and lose their jobs will not turn around and become solar panel installers or wind turbine maintenance technicians. The most likely outcome is life will get worse for them. We've seen the consequences of this already from the manufacturing sector, and it's not pretty. Drugs, poverty, violence, depression.
I'm not saying we should not close down coal plants, I'm just saying there will be consequences and "they'll all work for clean tech, and live happily ever after" is not a responsible plan.
They could. They won’t, because of loss aversion and inertia. But a smart community could tell Bloomberg they’ll close their plant if they get a subsidy for a battery plant or a very large concentrated solar power plant.
It’s a prisoner’s dilemma. And I don’t know if there’s a solution for the mines. But the tragedy is that the populations surrounded by coal aren’t selecting for long-term decision makers.
Of course the real problem is that most renewables are too efficient. They don't need that many people. Once the wind turbine, solar panels, or batteries are installed they don't need someone out there every day working on them. Not the way that coal miners have to keep digging coal. It's the kind of job that puts itself out of business over time.
There is tons of private capital ready to finance new plants. If coal communities grant permits, the panels will be laid.
Also, I’m suggesting a plan an enterprising community could launch to put themselves at the front of the line. Hell, they could probably sell carbon credits against the phase-out.
Georgia Power builds utility-scale solar plants smaller than that[1]. 139 MW in the $200m price range (in 2017) certainly counts.
Add to that in order to build a $200m plant does not require $200m of liquid cash any more than buying a $500k house requires $500k of liquid cash.
$500m can put a significant amount of utility-scale solar online (although this effort does not appear to be geared to directly instantiate new power generation).
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/georgia-power-annou...
It's also worth noting that many coal plant "shutdowns" are actually just conversions to natural gas, which from a carbon perspective is more of a sidestep. Better for the environment, but far less so than offsetting the production with renewables.
> What happened to coal jobs is even simpler. It is the same thing that happened throughout much of the country — productivity gains led to fewer workers needed to produce the same output.
Sure some people will re-train and join a new industry, but we still need heavy equipment operators for other construction sites. There is potential that a big mining site for lithium could open up [2], then we would need miners yet again. There will unfortunately be those who don't want to move or retrain that will instead resort to just doing drugs.
Personally I think we should welcome phasing out coal and, as policy, offer help to those who's jobs were displaced to prevent creation of meth towns.
[1] https://siepr.stanford.edu/publications/policy-brief/what-ki... [2] https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/30/23849619/lithium-ev-batte...
The economy is receiving enormous benefits from increased automation and AI and will only continue to do so super-linearly (if not exponentially) for the foreseeable future. We get to decide whether those benefits should go entirely to the people who already own everything, or whether some fraction of those benefits should go to everyone. If we can finally recognize that hundred-billionaires exist not by being a million times smarter and more productive than everyone else, but by riding the waves of a heavily interconnected and increasingly automated economy, maybe we'll finally accept heavy taxes on the beneficiaries of such automation that can be distributed as basic income.
So that's the answer, or at least a huge step in the right direction: basic income. For everyone.
Meanwhile, let's still shut down coal plants, shall we?
Michael Bloomberg Is Throwing $500M at Efforts to Shut Down All U.S. Coal Plants
(to avoid confusion with the company)
How you can even try to conflate the two as being the same is just short sighted.
In this scenario the board works for him, not the other way around.
Huge difference there because it spent some time in his account, if you are his accountant or if you are Bank of America, but for the rest of us the distinction is largely a waste of time.
contradiction?
> "Billionaire, philanthropist, and former NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced this week that he will invest $500 million into his campaign to shut down coal plants and halve gas use by 2030."
So it's not actually going to help replace all that energy with carbon free energy from nuclear &c?
Who is going to pay to replace all those coal plants? I expect that will cost orders of magnitudes more.
Forget climate change, natural resources are already stretched to the point where the cost of living is sky-rocketing. We were distracted by the pandemic...it is/was not the main problem. Billions of people trying to live the industrial life is the problem. Natural resources and land are the bottleneck.
Overnight, the price of automobiles increased by 30%. Healthcare, housing, and energy are the root cause right now (been soaring for decades). By the time you figure those out you won't have enough bauxite or some shit.