Coal is mostly sticking around in the US because of federal overreach to keep unprofitable and ancient coal generators going long after anybody wants to pay for the high maintenance.
Last week, a Colorado utility was "respectfully" asking to be able to close a plant:
> TTri-State Generation and partner Platte River Power Authority had a “respectful” but emphatic response late Thursday to the Trump administration ordering them to keep Craig’s Unit 1 coal-fired plant open past the New Year:
> They don’t need it, they don’t want it, and their inflation-strapped consumers can’t afford the higher bills. Plus, the federal order is unconstitutional.
TVA has also been begging to close a money losing coal plant for a while now, writing letters to FERC about it, but I can't find the link now.
New coal is far too expensive to build anymore too. Handling big amounts of solid material is expensive, and big old unresponsive baseload is undesirable for achieving economic efficiency.
Even China, which is still building new coal plants, is lessening their coal usage. Personally I think they'll keep some around to continue economic influence on Australia, which is one their primary countries for experimenting with methods to increase their soft power.
There is no technical or economic reason to want coal power today.
Thank you for such a thoughtful comment. There's politics that gets flagged on this site, and there's politics that makes me think about things with more clarity. Yours is obviously the latter.
Collective decisions are unavoidably political, and grid electricity has to be a collective decision! My hope is that we can take the partisan aspect out of the politics, however, and reduce it to a discussion of the tradeoff of values: cost, reliability, climate, and any other values that we need to include. Fortunately I think that for nearly any value set, the answer is very similar.
That serves 65+ Million people in the north east and is keeping them from dying of cold this past week, including today (Temp outside in the mid-hudson valley is 15F / -9C), and overnight will be 8F / -13C).
Just for context - electricity somehow powers everything in most homes. Your oil or propane furnace needs a power hookup to ignite.
Coal is the most expensive form of energy. We need the energy those coal plants are producing, but we don't need the energy to come from coal and the sooner we replace those coal plants the sooner the people getting that energy can get a break on energy costs. Assuming data centers don't offset the reductions via creating excessive demand.
PJM probably isn't a great example, it's been famously slow to approve new generation, hasn't it? And the rates aren't exactly super cheap.
We shouldn't get rid of coal without having something to replace it (ideally nuclear/solar/wind, but realistically probably gas), but I think the point was just that nobody would build a new coal plant today or keep them running for longer than they need to. They're inefficient and fairly expensive.
> to keep unprofitable and ancient coal generators going long after anybody wants to pay for the high maintenance.
In EU 90% of expenses of running coal plants are taxes, yet it can still compete with subsidized green energy! It would be in everybody best interest, to allow building modern coal plants, to replace toxic inefficient stuff from 1960ties.
But with the overregulated and overtaxes industry, we have the worst from all options.
In the US, natural gas is extremely cheap, far cheaper than in the EU, and it will remain that way as long as we are still extracting oil via fracking.
Replacing existing coal with natural gas is better, cheaper, etc. etc. and it's just downright "dumb" to build coal as explained in a parallel comment that links to youtube.
But even new natural gas is likely to end up as stranded capital. Solar and wind are cheaper already, and backing that with storage, today, is nipping at the cost of most new natural gas plants. And in 3, 5, 10 years? Price trends are going to make even the cheap cost of natural gas as a fuel more expensive than using solar and storage.
I'd be very surprised if 90% of the expense of coal was tax, as that would make taxes 9x higher than fuel. Not surprised because it wouldn't make scientific sense, the negative externalities of coal are massive and any hard-nosed free marketer should be advocating for putting a price on those negative externalities, but surprised because the politics of Europe allow that!
Also, if taxes on coal or >9x the cost of the fuel, wouldn't that start to make natural gas much more cost effective too, even in Europe? Or does natural gas have similar taxes?
I'm skeptical that it's easier. On the numbers alone, artisanal and small scale gold mining (apparently) accounts for 15-20% of global gold production. But coal accounts for 35% of total electricity generation.
Did you know that Captain Planet was straight up created to be pro environmentalist and anti-oil propaganda?
>Captain Planet and the Planeteers (1990–1996) was a pioneering animated series designed by Ted Turner and producer Barbara Pyle as environmental, pro-social "edutainment" to influence children towards ecological activism. It aimed to combat pollution and encourage environmental stewardship, often using over-the-top, stereotypical villains to represent corporate greed and ecological destruction.
Our parents let us get brainwashed by hippies and corporations as kids haha
The only problem with captain planet was the lack of nuance. Most people driving environmental degredation aren't over the top villains. Just executives acting in the best interest of their shareholders, but in general influencing kids to care about the environment is a pretty positive/pro-social thing to do.
Captain Planet always bothered me as a kid, even though I was (and continue to be) supportive of environmental protection. There was too much evil for the sake of evil. People don't destroy the environment because they want to. The destroy it because they don't care. They don't care because they are driven by greed, or some other motivation that is ultimately damaging to the environment, society, and civilization.
I was under the impression that Captain Planet was sort of Ted Turner's pet project who wanted something a bit less violent and more educational. And if I'm not mistaking it also led to the end of Swat Kats.
This. Most cartoons produced on the 80's/90's were made to sell merch like toys. You can thank Gi-Joe. The irony here is a TV show about environmentalism generated pollution in the process of making plastic action figures and branded clothing which mostly wind up in the dump.
>Our parents let us get brainwashed by hippies and corporations as kids haha
Yes, well the alternative, where the entire media system that might offer a cartoon like Captain Planet is owned by one side, is working out super well and in no way slants anyone's view of anything. Good God, my dad still fights weird battles like this tiny skirmish without ever being able to see the larger picture and how immaterial this is.
Brainwashing has the connotation of going through cult programming. Captain Planet doesn't involve the kind of tight control over your interpersonal relationships that requires. To the extent any of us were "brainwashed" it would have been because the people around us were largely in agreement with the messaging in that show. I submit that many people still are.
Also "brainwashing" generally implies an efficacy that we didn't see in real world results. The generation raised on shows like Captain Planet don't seem that much more "eco-conscious" than those before or after that period of children's programming. If anything, villains from that show being elected to the highest offices in the US decades later seems to directly refute that it was anything like "brainwashing".
(ETA: Not to mention that the biggest takeaways from such shows was that individual action was sometimes more important than corporate or regulatory action, a message itself designed by the oil companies to avoid responsibility. If there was propaganda in those shows, it may not have been the heroes winning, but the idea that all we need are a few magic heroes rather than government regulations.)
Sesame Street is still putting out new episodes. Turns out the "learn to count" and "be nice to your neighbors" industry wields a lot more power than anyone thought.
For us individually. For us collectively it was a horrible thing. We lost the means and incentive to produce anything durable, including a healthy, educated, sustainable society.
People planning the post-WWII system wildly overestimated how how disciplined Americans could be.
The whole point of the US transitioning to a service economy was that it would upskill the workforce into the world's Delta Force team of highly educated scientists, engineers, researchers, etc. The rest of the world would handle the boring stuff like actually manufacturing the beautiful inventions designed by the US.
The problem is that a lot of the US populace is gung-ho patriotic and willing to die for their country, but absolutely refuses to learn math or generally do their homework for their country, which is what's actually required for this whole scheme to work.
I'm paraphrasing the shockingly astute observations of this guy[1].
It's fascinating how education has COMPLETELY fallen off the radar politically in the last 10-15 years.
Even before we introduced a WWE manager for the Secretary of Education, we stopped discussing educational competitiveness. I can recall a couple decades ago every year or two the news having nervous handwringing stories about "(originally Japanese, then Korean, then Chinese) 6th graders have the math skills to design a full lunar rocket launch system, while American high-school graduates are incapable of filling out a Lotto playslip correctly".
The only time anyone talks about schools now is "is one getting shot up" or "looking for an excuse to ban books or siphon the few remaining dollars the public school programs have left into private/charter/religious schools that aren't necessarily delivering better overall outcomes." Rather than fixing the affordability crisis in secondary education, we're seeing an awful lot of amplification on the "not everyone should go to college" narrative, which might be technically accurate but seems to undermine the Delta Force plan you mentioned even more. Nobody seems to make education a central campaign issue anymore (even before all issues were subsumed by "will there be a fair election next time?")
The only way it makes sense is if we gave up on the idea of education as an economic driver. What is our economic vision for 2050? Feels like the current administration has maybe two ideas left:
* Hope everyone else leaves the petrostate pool, either by supply collapse or market trend/long term economic vision shifts, and then we can be the world's leading supplier of goo, from a puppetized Venezuela and maybe by coaxing Alberta seperatism enough.
* Bully economics, no longer even trying to compete on legitimate product merits and just saying "You'll buy 70,000 Dodge Darts if you don't want us to start shooting up your fishing boats."
Yeah, I've heard this interpretation before that this is the US trying to wean itself off the resource curse bestowed by a strong dollar. I think it's a fun idea, but there is no reason or strategy to this, I'm afraid. Just stupid people doing what they do best, doing stupid things.
I agree, the whole thing is stupid. But, when you don't have a healthy, educated society, they wind up being easily conned into electing stupid greedy people. So it seems that the resource curse may lead inevitably to systemic failure. Good times make weak men.
Yes... so lets vote someone in that does all the things towards creating a less healthy, less educated and less sustainable society.
US was doing just fine btw. I know this because people like you blow the small issues way out of proportion, and the reason this haplens is that there is no real issues to worry about.
Whoa there. You're making quite some assumptions about me, it seems. I'm in no way advocating for the present administration, not in strategy nor in tactics nor in any other way.
I do think that the US was not "doing just fine", clearly, because our society was not healthy or educated or sustainable enough to avoid our present fate. It's easy to blame 'them' for all our woes, when we collectively made 'them'. Obviously we can't prevent every idiot and psychopath from existing, but we've certainly failed some 30% of our population if they fall for this crap. And this is the price we pay.
They built boats to sail down the Salt River, to the Colorado River, and to Mexico. Of course the salt river is almost always just a dry river bed. It's shocking to me that no dramatization of this escape exists
I mean, their escape was quite complex and did actually "work", it's just they didn't get very far beyond that. Any dramatization would clearly need some comedic element
Military-grade just means it has a spec, now, I will admit having a spec is nice, very nice. but in general it says little about the actual quality of the item. And if the spec can't be found or there is no spec. Probably best to stay away, in those cases they are not even selling you the snake oil but the sound of it sloshing in the bottle.
Yeah if you see something labelling itself "MIL-SPEC", that's grade A snake oil bullshit.
That said military spec stuff is actually generally a good sign that something is of higher quality than random off the shelf garbage but only if you know there's a specific spec you want it to work with. And most of the time you aren't even necessarily looking for a MIL-STD (standard) but rather a MIL-PRF (performance rating/spec).
So like if something is "MIL-SPEC" run. But if you see say a spool of fiber that is "MIL-STD-1678 compliant" and more importantly "MIL-PRF-49291 compliant" and "MIL-PRF-85054 compliant", that's probably a really good sign that it'll do its job. The former PRF documenting perf requirements for the fiber itself and the latter PRF the cabling/sheath's corrosion and deterioration resistance.
It's the military so odds are it'll probably cost extra for that and it'll still kinda suck but it'll suck in exactly the way they promised.
Hell, anything even close to salt water is apt to get ate. What's funny is you'll see people say they want to retire and get a beach house. No. You. Don't. Blowing sand is hard on stuff, getting in gears and moving parts. But the salt, the salt is like some alien monster that just dissolves things that flat landers would never expect. Get the smallest amount of saltwater flooding in a closet with equipment and things start to corrode away like it's an alien acid world.
Military grade afaict just implies the military ‘could’ use it, by that definition almost any company sells military grade products or services, except companies who explicitly would not sell to the military.
In the US, "military grade" is like "natural". There is no legally enforced meaning, so it means whatever the manufacturer says it means. Sometimes that's something real and of some value, but the majority of the time it's just a meaningless marketing buzzword.
the military often writes a spec and then refuses to buy anything that doesn't meet it. Most soldiers are not going to walmart to get supplies - even f walmart sells that type of thing.
"military grade" isn't a protected phrase. As a consumer you might be able to sue them if the thing breaks and they can't prove that phrase meant anything? But doubtful.
Claiming to conform to a more specific product or process standard would be more specific fraud.
But in general though "military grade" is a red flag for shitty marketing.
If you had one, you could also buy games in the form of “cartridges”. Putting one of those cartridges into the gameboy would let you play the game for as long as the batteries held out.
I don’t disagree but it’s not hard to understand why people think “military grade” means it’s better. “Military grade” communicates tough/durable/stress tested to a lot of people. Veteran/patriot isn’t an indicator of build quality, even if it is also pandering to a certain sensibility.
For many products it just means it's a small run from a group that may not have a lot of domain experience using materials and methods that will make the end product appear superior to buyers.
Totally understand that, I’m just talking about the difference between “patriot/veteran” and “military grade” to the average person. The latter heavily implies “quality build” while also appealing to people (mostly dudes) who want that sort of label for whatever reason, while the former is purely about values and has no implications as far as quality is concerned.
There are some ratings, like semiconductor temperature ratings, with labels that include "military", (e.g. manufacturers may name their products, from the narrowest to widest operating temperatures, with something like: commercial, industrial, automotive, military) and "military" would indicate a better product.
On the other hand, when a product is designed and manufactured to sell to a military, it's going to be expensive, and that extra cost isn't going to quality or capability, it's going to compliance. You're more than likely paying extra to get something using some old and outdated technology, that includes paperwork to prove that it's only built using the approved old and outdated technology.
Hand-beaten from Tibetan silver by buddhist monks who live in a cave in the Himalayas. You just have to make sure the chakras are aligned correctly when you've installed it.
A company can not sell a product to consumers cheaper than it can sell to the federal government, and the federal government contract normally comes first. A lot of the stuff you can buy (minus restricted items), it'll just cost you.
They can't sell the same thing but they can sell something slightly different. put a different type of paint on it and you can sell for different prices.
FS will literally sell you heavy-duty Armored (e.g. thicker/stronger sheath) cable and the packet it comes in will be labelled "military grade". That's literally your scenario.
Is one supposed to send it back for a refund and order the much thinner, less-durable cable? Or is perhaps the landscape not as black-and-white as your "this is automatically snake-oil"?
But shitload of vendors won't bother and just sell you a "military grade" or, even in non-english speaking countriess, say a "MIL-SPEC Daniel Defense AR-15". They won't list every spec in detail. And they make good AR-15s (but not cheap).
Anyone who thinks the triggers listed as MIL-SPEC from, say, Geissele here:
Guess what? Its screen never broke overnight like the one of my MacBook M1 Air did (the infamous "bendgate").
I can bend my LG Gram's screen and it's keeps working fine. I can let it drop. Friend who sold it to me stepped on it when he woke up once.
There's a very big difference between saying: "There are shady vendors" and saying "Military specs do not exists and it's impossible for consumers to buy items passing military specifications".
Yes, there are dishonest vendors.
Yes, military specs do exist.
And, yes, it's possible for consumers to buy products passing (and even surpassing) actual military specs.
If you buy a commercial product labelled "military grade", you are also buying snake oil.
"Military grade" is generally shit. It's built down to a price, manufactured the cheapest possible way, so they can get the lowest possible tender submitted. Bonus prize if the manufacturer is owned by either someone already in government, or with close ties to someone in government.
The only "military grade" devices I own are some woefully unsuccessful radios, which failed in the market because they were actually good - easy to use, reliable, and easy to repair - which made them about 5% more expensive than the cheapest option which was made by a company part-owned by the government and part-owned by someone who donates heavily to the Conservatives.
Look, we could spend a fraction of what we do, but then there would be people who get things for free or even fraudulently. You can see just how bad that would be from an American mindset.
It's crazy that it's been almost 20 years since I played a large amount of quake/quake 2/q3a, but I can instantly recognize the architecture of the levels that are re-skinned. The original map development was incredibly iconic.
It's crazy that there can be over a quarter century between the last time I played Quake, yet the first thing I do in e1m1 is shoot the fake wall in the recessed area on the right and grab the shotgun shells from the secret area…
Much more apt to say "that's not who we aspire to be'
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