Fourth-Largest Coal Producer In the US Files For Bankruptcy (arstechnica.com) 256
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Cloud Peak Energy, the U.S.' fourth-largest coal mining company, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy late last week as the company missed an extension deadline to make a $1.8 million loan payment. In a statement, Cloud Peak said it will continue to operate its three massive coal mines in Wyoming and Montana while it goes through the restructuring process. Colin Marshall, the president and CEO of the company, said that he believed a sale of the company's assets "will provide the best opportunity to maximize value for Cloud Peak Energy."
Cloud Peak was one of the few major coal producers who escaped the significant coal industry downturn between 2015 and 2016. That bought it a reputation for prudence and business acumen. But thinning margins have strained the mining company as customers for thermal coal continue to dry up. Coal-fired electricity is expected to fall this summer, even though summer months are usually boom times for coal plants as air conditioning bolsters electricity demand. That's because cheap natural gas and a boost in renewable capacity have displaced dirtier, more expensive coal. According to the Casper Star Tribune, Cloud Peak shipped 50 million tons of coal in 2018. The paper noted that after the bankruptcy filing, "speculation almost immediately began that Cloud Peak would sell its mines."
Cloud Peak was one of the few major coal producers who escaped the significant coal industry downturn between 2015 and 2016. That bought it a reputation for prudence and business acumen. But thinning margins have strained the mining company as customers for thermal coal continue to dry up. Coal-fired electricity is expected to fall this summer, even though summer months are usually boom times for coal plants as air conditioning bolsters electricity demand. That's because cheap natural gas and a boost in renewable capacity have displaced dirtier, more expensive coal. According to the Casper Star Tribune, Cloud Peak shipped 50 million tons of coal in 2018. The paper noted that after the bankruptcy filing, "speculation almost immediately began that Cloud Peak would sell its mines."
It Begins (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It Begins (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, it begins. Trump government dolling out corporate welfare.
Re:It Begins (Score:5, Funny)
trump does the thing he does best (well, second to lying, anyway)... bankrupting companies.
Re:It Begins (Score:5, Informative)
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They are doing much more than that in China, https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]. They are doing a real push into coal direct liquefaction. It remains to be seen how efficient and clean they can get the process. In this case though extensive efficient coal liquefaction would simply kill oil and gas imports and of course the technology would spread globally, so, fracking gas and oil would die instead. It certainly is interesting fossil fuel times but the writing is certainly on the wall, they should have taken
Re:It Begins (Score:5, Informative)
Mining is becoming less and less labor-intensive though, as coal now comes mostly from surface open-pit mines [eia.gov] where a bucket-wheel excavator [youtube.com] ran by half-dozen does the work of hundreds of miners. Which is killing all those high paying jobs.
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Coal can only survive with corporate welfare because it's a bad energy source.
The corporate welfare is mainly targeted toward mining companies in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and WV, which are swing states.
Wyoming is solid red, and only has 3 electoral votes anyway. So they get screwed, even though they mine as much coal as the rest of the country combined.
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Actually, being labour intensive is by far the best thing about coal. Petroleum needs very few people, but that means that the profits from the production can be commandeered by a small number of people. That's basically why most petrostates are oligarchies.
Coal needs a lot of relatively well paid people to dig the coal out of the ground, it's dirty, dangerous, messy, but skilled work. That means that many of the profits get distributed over a relatively large worker base which is good for the economy.
And h
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Open pit mines or hill/mountain cap mines (the majority of the new coal "mines" opened today) are a lot less labor intensive than the days of deep coal mining. There is still the steep environmental cost of coal, such as mercury pollution of waterways and water tables, aerial release of sulfur, coal ash buildup and the release of radioactive particles to the atmosphere. Cleanup of these expensive environmental pollutants is often passed on to the taxpayer as the coal and energy companies have paid more than
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Um, tell me the administration in your lifetime that *hasn't* dolled out corporate welfare? You likely winked at it until you could start screaming "Trump!!!111!!!!"
It's not as much as that you're wrong, it's a matter of you being inconsistent.
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Socialism for the rich. Capitalism for the rest of us.
He tried and failed (Score:3)
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And so it begins. I'm sure there will be a few more before to long.
... And that's not a bad thing.
Move those jobs and investments to more profitable and forward looking industries. Coal is 19th Century- long over due being phased out.
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> cheap natural gas
That ain't exactly solar panels.
Besides that, companies can recover from bankruptcy. Maybe they'll sell off their coal assets and invest in natural gas?
Word verification: brothels
The full quote from the article:
Inexpensive and cleaner-burning natural gas, and increasingly inexpensive wind and solar power, have become attractive alternatives to coal power in the U.S.
Re:It Begins (Score:5, Informative)
Wind seems to be the biggie. I listened to a talk from an EE faculty member a few weeks ago - he broke down the unsubsidized costs per delivered megawatt from the various significant sources of electrical power in use today, and wind was the cheapest by a significant margin. Utility-grade solar was #2, but still well behind wind. Coal, on the other hand, is pretty expensive.
His premise was basically “renewables will win, but it won’t have anything to do with being ‘green’... it’s all about the economics”.
FWIW current nuclear power was not particularly competitive.
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Utility-grade solar was #2, but still well behind wind. Coal, on the other hand, is pretty expensive.
So now I am very curious . . . where were hydro and thermal on the list . . . ?
Granted, it's very location dependent, but for countries where this is an option, it would be interesting to know.
Re:It Begins (Score:5, Insightful)
Thermal can work *ANYWHERE* it all depends on how far down you are willing to drill. Obviously if you are sitting on top of an active volcano it is a lot more attractive. However that said with the USA, Hawaii while being very active geologically gets most of its power from burning oil. Now admittedly they did have one geothermal power plant that was overrun by lava last year, but only having one is like crazy silly. One would have thought that with an abundance of sun, wind and lava Hawaii would be carbon neutral by now. Heck with limited size of the islands and the need to import all the oil one would have thought it would be a paradise for electric vehicles because the limited range is rendered mute.
Re: It Begins (Score:2)
When I was in Honlulu 2-3 years ago, I noticed even the scummy looking apartments all had solar panels on their roofs
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That should say "slummy", not "scummy". Damn autocorrect
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Hawaii is a very dysfunctional state, even worse than Louisiana and Illinois in many ways. It has a solid blue one-party government, which leads to corruption and clientelism. A tiny minority of Native Hawaiian activists are able to stonewall geothermal energy by claiming it is "stealing the breath of Pele." The public utilities have been allowed to kill off grid-connected solar. It is impossible to get a permit to build a wind farm, although the steady oceanic trade winds make it a perfect location.
So
Re:It Begins (Score:4)
Hawaiian activists are able to stonewall geothermal energy by claiming it is "stealing the breath of Pele."
Which is complete bullshit an they know it. Pele is an active goddess. She won't stand by and let puny humans do things that displease her. Many a foolish mortal has earned Pele wrath, much to their displeasure.
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Thermal can work *ANYWHERE* it all depends on how far down you are willing to drill. Obviously if you are sitting on top of an active volcano it is a lot more attractive.
It's really not cost-effective unless you want to use the heat directly. By the time you've converted it into electricity, and done the maintenance, geothermal power doesn't make so much sense.
However that said with the USA, Hawaii while being very active geologically gets most of its power from burning oil.
It's not so easy to find a good place to put a geothermal plant...
Now admittedly they did have one geothermal power plant that was overrun by lava last year, but only having one is like crazy silly.
...see? They only had one, they put it in the best place they could find, and it still got destroyed.
They don't need geothermal, because they can have solar and wind. With proper design, you can orient the turbine and blades such that you can operate a
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Once offshore wind gets price competitive the rate of change will massively accelerate. No NIMBYs to object, and more than enough space to have massive over-capacity and geographic distribution for base load.
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No good. The sun doesn't shine when you want electricity, and it's the same for the wind blowing.
If you won't take Trump's word for it, Gimli from LotR said so on Question Time last week. You'd think the so-called "scientists" would be able to invent some way to store it, but they're too busy worrying about shirts.
I've still got all my own teeth.
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Bravo, Sir. I can't tell if this is a parody or not.
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No good. The sun doesn't shine when you want electricity, and it's the same for the wind blowing.
If you won't take Trump's word for it, Gimli from LotR said so on Question Time last week. You'd think the so-called "scientists" would be able to invent some way to store it, but they're too busy worrying about shirts.
I've still got all my own teeth.
You forgot to mention Wind Power cancer!
Okay now - yours was the best doggone post I've seen in months. I laugh everytime I re-read it.
Re: It Begins (Score:2, Funny)
Just build windmills near politicians, they are all total windbags
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Don't worry, NIMBYs can object to offshore wind just as well [wikipedia.org]
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Don't worry, NIMBYs can object to offshore wind just as well [wikipedia.org]
Someone is going to object to anything and everything.
"You will never reach your destination if you stop and throw stones at every dog that barks."
W. Churchill
Re:It Begins (Score:5)
Someone is going to object to anything and everything.
An sometime, someone needs to tell these people they can go fuck themselves. "fuck off" should always be a valid answer to anything.
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It's funny, but I think the wind turbines look kind of cool. I remember driving along I-90 outside of Ellensburg Washington in the winter some time ago. We'd stopped at a rest area (heading east, just before you drop down into the Columbia Gorge) - all the turbines were silently spinning there with their feet shrouded in fog. It just seemed eerie and awesome.
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It's funny, but I think the wind turbines look kind of cool.
Yeah, this. When I see wind turbines I experience a little reverie about the future encapsulating the past, and cycles turning within cycles. They're graceful, almost storklike. They represent clean power. I don't get what part of this makes people mad.
Re:It Begins (Score:4)
change they don't quite understand
Which is pretty dumb when you think about it. Wind power is one of the oldest sources of power known to humans. We have been using windmills to pump water and grind grain for centuries. Ships have been using it for millennia. This is not a new technology.
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We will end up with periods where we have a big excess of energy available. It will be taken up by things like smart car chargers or industry that can wait for cheap energy. Make some hydrogen or desalinate some water. Suck some CO2 out of the atmosphere.
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One thing that I have often thought of is we seem to put a priority on coming up with new sources of energy, wind, solar, or burning politicians. Followed by putting more research in to storage, which to be fair we could probably use more research. Then we seem to think of energy efficiency as a after thought.
Seems kind of backwards to me. We should move energy efficiency to the top of the list, then followed by storage and finally production. If we had more efficient systems then we really wouldn'
He was mixing base laod and off load (Score:2)
Re:He was mixing base laod and off load (Score:5, Insightful)
The "Base load power" talking point is what's misleading. The idea that renewable sources combined can't possibly meet all of our electrical energy needs has been getting discredited for the better part of a decade at this point.
Even the (now former) chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission thinks it's nonsense; https://archive.nytimes.com/ww... [nytimes.com]
And for what it's worth, we can do "massive storage" right now. We've had the technology to do it for over a century now, but lack the political will or financial incentive to do it... but it can be done and there's nothing particularly challenging about it on the technical level. Helping the cause is we probably don't need nearly as much storage as you might think.
=Smidge=
It just *handwave* away (Score:2)
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there is no read solution to the night without wind.
And why would we need that?
There is no night without wind, especially not offshore.
If you had any clue, you would know that.
Re: He was mixing base laod and off load (Score:2)
Yes, we can do massive storage with 100 year old technology. How many massive valleys do you think are left in the US, that you have any chance of damming off and flooding up? Never mind all the environmentalists who will scream bloody murder, but all the people and their homes and businesses in those valleys?
And then add on top of that the huge amount of land and steel you need to place the wind and solar farms necessary to create an average equal to the baseload requirements- we're talking building 3x nam
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How many massive valleys do you think are left in the US, that you have any chance of damming off and flooding up?
About a million? Look on a map, moron. Yes, a million, not one thousand.
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Without a proper storage (physical or electrochemical, thermal etc... Baring local advantage none of those can really fulfill that need) wind and solar are only off load power.
Pretty accurate with a caveat. We have a lot of Wind turbines along the Allegheny front. The only time they stop is when the base load is down, or the occasional bat fly-by. But they are helping along with the base, not just peaking any more.
Coal , nuclear, gas etc... are base load. Nuclear is not competitive with renewable but it does not fulfill the same niche either. The day proper massive storage can be done, is the day renewable will be able to fulfill base load. Until then the comparison is misleading at best, a lie at worst.
That is a matter of time, not much else. My candidate for storage is a bit different than most. Nickel-Iron batteries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
At first blush, it would seem idiotic, but the almost constant charging, takes care of the energy retention issue,
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Perhaps you want to read up what base load is/means: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
And try to comprehend it, so you stop embarrassing yourself and your readers ...
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Those studies are often skewed one way or another. Sometimes they want to include economics of environmental impact in this ‘cost’. At the same time they deliberately leave out transportation costs. The transportation cost of renewables is currently very costly. Localized renewables simply feed a grid, but how expensive would that be if fossil fuels did not exist? Not every region can support enough renewables to meet energy demands. Either there is too much cloud cover or landscape not supporti
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Wind seems to be the biggie. I listened to a talk from an EE faculty member a few weeks ago - he broke down the unsubsidized costs per delivered megawatt from the various significant sources of electrical power in use today, and wind was the cheapest by a significant margin.
And we don't even have the wind blimps yet that could make wind produce even more power and get more energy per invested dollar. Once those become mainstream (if they live up to expectations) wind could become even more attractive.
good news (Score:5, Funny)
With all those big automated open-cut mines going out of business,
pick and shovel mining jobs will soon be booming again in West Virginia, just like the President promised.
Wait wait (Score:5, Funny)
But but but Glorious Leader Trump said coal is coming back, "bigger and better" than ever; surely he wasn't fibbing, was he?
Or was he talking about coal company bankruptcies?
*Clean* coal (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually he said "*Clean* Coal" Trump: "Coal is coming — clean coal. We love clean coal. And it’s coming back."
Under the scheme, coal power stations are paid to produce and capture the CO2, to get a tax credit.... which *requires* they make the CO2 to be eligable in the first place. So solar doesn't count.
And the *expansion* of the scheme under Trump makes the power prices *negative* (socialism for coal industry).
https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshuarhodes/2018/04/19/how-clean-coal-could-make-a-tidy-profit/#e5d13aa56545
"In the case of the coal plants, the estimated pre-credit bid would have been about $29/MWh, but the post-credit bids could be negative $9-16/MWh. This low bid would allow these plants to better compete in areas that have depressed wholesale market prices because of wind and solar. In fact, they could beat solar’s $0/MWh cost bids."
In other words, they could sell power at a loss, by selling the captured CO2 to the Trump (i.e. the low and middle income taxpayers who pay taxes would pick up the tab).
That would let them undercut solar on price.
Re:*Clean* coal (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:*Clean* coal (Score:4, Funny)
Of course it exists. Next you'll be claiming that non-fecal shit is a myth too.
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No, next they'll turn shit into butter. They have arrived at 50% success already, the spreading works, just the taste is slightly off.
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Yeah, you know, if clean coal was real instead of just being a marketing campaign fairy tale.
This reminds me of an advertising campaign in the US back in the 80's. Lots of medical folks were trying to convince everyone to eat less red meat and instead eat chicken.
Big Pork came up with the slogan: "Pork: The other white meat".
Which was totally missing the point, because from a nutritional standpoint, pork is in the league with red meat, not chicken.
So I'm thinking, maybe Big Coal can come up with something like, "Clean Coal: It's also renewable . . . it just takes a few million years."
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Wow, the US sure is the land of the future. You even have clean coal, but what I don't get, why aim so low, you could have gone for cold fusion.
I mean, if you invent something, at least do something impressive.
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Actually he said "*Clean* Coal" Trump: "Coal is coming — clean coal. We love clean coal. And it’s coming back."
Under the scheme, coal power stations are paid to produce and capture the CO2, to get a tax credit.... which *requires* they make the CO2 to be eligable in the first place. So solar doesn't count.
And the *expansion* of the scheme under Trump makes the power prices *negative* (socialism for coal industry).
https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshuarhodes/2018/04/19/how-clean-coal-could-make-a-tidy-profit/#e5d13aa56545
"In the case of the coal plants, the estimated pre-credit bid would have been about $29/MWh, but the post-credit bids could be negative $9-16/MWh. This low bid would allow these plants to better compete in areas that have depressed wholesale market prices because of wind and solar. In fact, they could beat solar’s $0/MWh cost bids."
In other words, they could sell power at a loss, by selling the captured CO2 to the Trump (i.e. the low and middle income taxpayers who pay taxes would pick up the tab).
That would let them undercut solar on price.
The only "clean coal" is the coal that's never mined in the first place.
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In other words, they could sell power at a loss
Operating a coal-fired power plant at a loss seems like a great business plan, please tell me more.
Let me guess- you'll lose money on every sale, but you'll make up for it in volume?
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Or was he talking about coal company bankruptcies?
I think he was just talking shit.
Re: Wait wait (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: Wait wait (Score:5, Insightful)
All they got from the Democrats was withering hostility. They got told to "learn to code". Their jobs were gone and not coming back and they needed to change.
So... what they got from the democrats was the truth. Sometimes the truth is not very nice, to the point where the foolish consider the truth to be hostility.
The only sympathy Trump gave them was lying to their faces so he'd get their votes.
and there are still no coal jobs.
Re: Wait wait (Score:4, Insightful)
The only sympathy Trump gave them was lying to their faces so he'd get their votes.
and there are still no coal jobs.
Trump exposed for all to see how truly corrupt and decadent the Republican party is. That doesn't make the Democratic party perfect. They are not, but Trump exposed that underneath all the bullshit there is nothing but a thirst for power and some common team goals that can be pursued at essentially any cost.
Trump is the biggest most effective Evil I've ever seen placed in a position of power in our country. He does so much shit that is so blatantly Evil and wrong, and it gets so little attention, because everyone is exhausted, and he will have gone on to do some other Evil shit that distracts from the first round of Evil shit. A lot of the shit he does to cause outrage seems to be intentional, just to distract from his previous outrage. His base is conditioned to believe only according to his state sponsored propaganda ecosystem and instinctively rejects conflicting information, making up wild excuses why it is all justified.
Fuck, Fox at times these days sounds worse than Baghdad Bob, and there is no outrage. He kept babbling that there was no collusion but we all saw it on live tv. He just turns out not to need to do so secretly when he could do so openly. Everyone's goals were on the table. He as much as said I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine, and they did. What's more, the only explanation that truly makes sense about how he talks about Russia is not that he fears his election will be made non legitimate. No, the fucker wants their help to win in 2020 and is determined to get it, fuck all ethics, patriotism or what is good for the country.
I'd like to hope the country will wise up and reject this shit, but in the end Trump's gravest crime, and it is grave indeed, is illustrating how to successfully con and divide the world to obtain power at any cost. He has shown us if your willing to push a country to the brink of civil war, well then few things are truly impossible. Russia couldn't have asked for a better asset. From all accounts he does his job of destroying America exceptionally well, and what's best is he does it simply for his own sake. That is his cost of his path to power.
He may indeed further subsidize coal, just to try to hold onto that power. He is at the realm of the ultimate con job. It's a topic he has spoken of often, just in respect to others, but given how he reflects everything you can see it really applies to him. His goal is to keep the scam going at least through the next election, and then he wins, but the country goes further down the drain.
I think ultimately you can destroy a country best from within, when it becomes decadent such that truth is a minority opinion, because at that point your building everything on sand, and that never ends well.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Wait wait (Score:5, Informative)
Hey look you're building up strawmen so you can look clever when you knock them down. Again.
Fact: Nobody ever claimed that telling laid-off journalists to "learn to code" is a hate crime
Fact: Twitter clamped down on "learn to code" tweets that it determined were part of a campaign of targeted harassment against certain journalists, which is against Twitter's ToS
Fact: 4chan incels were partly responsible for said harassment https://twitter.com/chick_in_k... [twitter.com]
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what happened to facts don't care about feelings (Score:2, Insightful)
So what if you don't like the FACT that coal isn't coming back? So WHAT if you don't like being told that you will be given funds to retrain for a job that will be useful? Should you be LIED TO by politicians AND YOU ACCEPT THOSE LIES *merely* because your feelings are hurt by the truth?
And then you have the UNMITIGATED GALL to complain about how politicians lie all the time?!?!?
YOU FUCKING REWARD THEM FOR LYING TO YOU and punish those who DARE to tell a truth you don't want to hear!
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I like how (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:I like how (Score:5, Insightful)
half the stories on here are how fossil fuel is weak and pathetic and going away on its own and the other half of stories are about how fossil fuel is entrenched and powerful and needs radical government action to purge it from the planet.
If you make some effort to read past the headlines, there is a lot to be learned. Energy is big money, which makes it powerful.
We subsidise *every* kind of energy, be it renewables, fossil, or nuclear. Just in different ways.
Coal is at the same time, the biggest source of power for many, and the most vulnerable. Gas is less polluting, and more able to fill the role of supplying peak demand. Vulnerable is not the opposite of powerful.
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Vulnerable is not the opposite of powerful.
The muscle in your heel is one of the most powerful in your body. Achilles will confirm that powerful can indeed be quite vulnerable.
/|\ pencil-necked dork. (Score:2)
Have you ever had someone wearing a helmet dive on you in such a way that the bars hit you right across the back of the heel?
Saying that it fucking hurts would be the understatement of the century.
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It's not that fossil fuels need radical action to get rid of them. We're talking about perishing resources after all, so even if nothing is done, sooner or later fossil fuels will be replaced by other sources just because of the price, as evidenced by this story for example. The problem is however that in the meanwhile the costs of using fossil fuels are massivel
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>There sure is, Germany is opening new ones! They shut down their nuclear power after Fukushima, to the applause of their electorate.
I think Germany will eventually regret that decision. It was entirely irrational and fear based. Everyone should be moving in the other direction or we will be wearing space suits just to walk outside in 100 years.
If anyone can build safe nuclear plants it is Germany ffs. They can build inherently safe designs and they can do it flawlessly or close enough. France is
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Unlike the US, Germany and most countries don't like to fund their defense on what is essentially paying for it by credit card. There is a reason the US has a deficit of 22 Trillion. What is essentially social welfare for the the military industrial complex, mixed with porkbarrel politics it is no surprise.
The russian spectre is just that a ghost. They can't compete (or afford) anymore on the physical battlefield so they just moved to a virtual one.
Re:I like how (Score:5, Insightful)
On the other hand, extracting coal is very expensive. You have large amounts of non-coal stuff, the excavation rubbish to remove and to store. Transporting coal is cumbersome as you have to load it onto trucks and freight wagons. Transporting them costs much energy and maintenance itself. And you can't do much other things than just burn the coal at fixed places, to generate heat for other processes, as the engines to effectively extract energy from coal are large and not very mobile.
Oil and gas for instance are much cheaper to excavate. You have much less rubbish except for the one coming out of the boring holes. Both can be transported via tubes, which, once laid, cost not much to operate and don't require much energy themselves. You can turn them into chemicals. They are easily to transport and to distribute, and the engines to effectively extract energy out of them are very small, easily to fire up and to move around.
So, Coal is really powerful and entrenched from a political point of view, but weak and vulnerable from an economical one.
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What kind of witless, drooling moron is unaware that coal (failing) and natural gas (doing well) are both fossil fuels?
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Indeed. Both realities exist at the same time.
Renewables are already cheaper than their fossil counterparts. So in the long run it's sure that reneable energy is the future.
But because the current fossil fuel industry is so powerful we are subsidising them to stay longer 'open'.
To create a really massive transition to new energy sources we need indeed important political measures:
* Reduce or elliminate any kind of support measures for fossil fuel (or any carbon release in general)
* Massively invest in the i
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The thing is, though, hydrocarbons are incredibly useful. There will always be edge cases where burning hydrocarbons is the only viable solution.
I have a 27 foot sailboat that I often use to travel into remote regions. She has a 20 gallon diesel tank, and and when on the motor burns about a gallon every three hours, giving me a 60 hour range. Even if I were to replace my 2300lb keel with batteries, I wouldn't have nearly the range.
That said, hydrocarbons so not need to come from fossil sources. For these ni
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Its the 80/20 rule all over again. We can get 80% of the way by changing just 20% of our behavior.
We don't need to completely eliminate fossil fuel. I bought a Tesla in 2013 so I'm personally committed to reducing my carbon footprint, but I'm still buying gas for my lawn mower.
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half the stories on here are how fossil fuel is weak and pathetic and going away on its own and the other half of stories are about how fossil fuel is entrenched and powerful and needs radical government action to purge it from the planet.
Apparently contradictory things can be true at the same time. I don't remember anyone saying "weak" or "pathetic" about fossil fuels, but many people do say they're going away on their own, including me. However, even if that's true it may still be necessary to use government action to purge fossil fuel use from the planet, because they're not going away quickly enough for necessary remediation of the biosphere, upon which we all depend for life.
Some arguments simply cannot be simplified such that the simpl
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A 2016 IMF working paper estimated that global fossil fuel subsidies were $5.3 trillion in 2015, which represents 6.5% of global GDP. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_subsidies#Impact_of_fossil_fuel_subsidies)
This is insane. It drives me crazy when I hear people say that subsidizing renewable energy and electric vehicles is a bad idea and insist we have to keep burning gas. What a bunch of brainwashed sheep.
Simply level the playing field - no subsid
Can't pay a mere $1.8 million? (Score:3, Insightful)
Sounds like Chapter 11 isn't going to save this one... but I'm sure Trumpelstiltskin will step up to provide the requisite corporate welfare.
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I was thinking the same thing. For a company that is the fourth-largest of its kind in the US, 2 million dollars should be pocket change.
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For a company that is the fourth-largest of its kind in the US, 2 million dollars should be pocket change.
Is true, you must lose 100M per year before oligarchs consider you for candidate. I already say too much, comrades.
how about chapter 7 instead? (Score:2)
Forests (Score:2)
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Nature article [nature.com]
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Photosynthesis isn't very efficient. You can accomplish at least an order of magnitude better replacing coal with PV. As an additional benefit, PV can be deployed in useless desert areas where they don't compete with agriculture, and where they don't require water or nutrients.
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all the forests in the USA sink about about 10% of the carbon dioxide it produces each year... losing battle, you're not going to plant and grow 90% more forest in a couple decades
This topic needs a theme song (Score:2)
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It will be the responsibility of the tax payers to bail out these corporations, again?
Of course, but only after they shed their pension obligations (which will get picked up by the government under ERISA but at a fraction of the payout to beneficiaries) and then pay huge bonuses to their execs for removing that liability from their balance sheets.
Re:Retrain the deplorables (Score:4, Interesting)
Retrain them for clean and safe nuclear. Pebble bed for the win! It's also renewable in the sense that often nuclear fuel can be reused again and Thorium is so plentiful it may as well be sunlight. Cost is not really the issue here. If you look at the long term costs I think nuclear would compete quite well with flimsy solar panels that only put out between 10 and 2 and need deserts or delicate wind turbines that require too much wind to be really practical in most places outside of Antarctica or Patagonia or Wyoming. Nuclear is proven, practical, reliable, durable, modern, and even safe if properly maintained and especially if one of the newer inherently safe designs are used. People are just not rational about this. Nuclear is the obvious solution to this problem. Cost isn't even really the problem. The problem is a solution that will actually work to significantly reduce our CO2 emission. Something practical. That means nuclear. Period. If people are genuinely worried that we as a species are in danger from CO2 they should be 100% in favor of whatever works and that is nuclear at least for now.
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Retrain them for clean and safe nuclear.
First, we'd have to invent it.
Pebble bed for the win!
What's that? Pebble bed [wikipedia.org] is safe, you say?
Thorium is so plentiful it may as well be sunlight.
Most thorium comes from monazite, which is on average only 2.5% thorium, and the extraction process is energy-intensive.
Cost is not really the issue here.
It most certainly is. The technology you promote has not even yet been refined to a usable stage. That alone will have significant costs.
If you look at the long term costs
Yes, let's. Nuclear decommissioning is hazardous and costly. Disposal of the pebble waste is less hazardous than ordinary waste disposal, but more costly because of the larger volume.
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Yeah I wish. I am unemployed and unemployable. I just don't see how solar panels are the solution. They are only good for like 4-6 hours per day and only if it's not raining or cloudy or snowing. Basically deserts are the only practical location. You need superbatteries to store energy for the other 18-20 hours. They are so limited. And they don't even last that long before they start losing capacity. They are the Green Man's dream, but the dream is not reality and may never be. Maybe artificial photosynthe
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